Dr. Anacker received his PhD in 2011 at King’s College London in the UK, where he used a novel human hippocampal stem cell model to study the effects of stress hormones and antidepressants on hippocampal neurogenesis in vitro. He then completed postdoctoral training at McGill University in Montreal, where he studied neural circuits underlying vulnerability to chronic social stress, as well as epigenetic effects of early life influences on brain function and behavior. He continued his postdoctoral training at Columbia University in New York, where he discovered that adult hippocampal neurogenesis confers stress resilience by inhibiting neural activity of the ventral dentate gyrus. Dr. Anacker started his lab in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia in 2019, where he studies the neural circuits and molecular mechanisms underlying stress susceptibility and resilience. His lab combines transgenic mouse models, circuit tracing techniques, in vivo brain imaging, optogenetics, and molecular sequencing approaches, to study how stress at different stages of development causes psychiatric disorders. The goal of this research is to find new ways to target these mechanisms so that we can develop novel treatments and preventive strategies for psychiatric disorders.