Dr. Dölen earned her M.D., Ph.D. at Brown University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she carried out seminal work on the pathogenesis of autism. Dr. Dölen completed postdoctoral training in the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford University, where she did paradigm-shifting work on the neural circuits underlying social reward learning. In 2014, Dr. Dölen began her faculty position in the Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine. Her laboratory studies the neurotransmitters, brain circuits, developmental programs, and evolution of social behaviors, with a focus on diseases of the social brain (including autism, schizophrenia, PTSD, and addiction). Recently, her lab has become interested in uncovering how the psychedelic drug MDMA induces prosocial behaviors across species (including humans, mice, and octopuses), as well as shedding light on the mechanisms underlying MDMA’s profound therapeutic effects. Dr. Dölen is the recipient of several prestigious awards including: the Joukowsky Family Foundation Award, the Conquer Fragile X Rising Star Award, the Angus MacDonald Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the Society for Social Neuroscience Early Career Award, the Searle Scholars Award, and the Johns Hopkins University President’s Frontier Award.

Drawing inspiration from J.Z. Young’s book, A Model of the Brain (Oxford, 1964) Dr. Dölen has argued that the best way to understand ‘the rules’ for how to encode behavioral complexity in the brain would be to compare maximally divergent octopus and mammalian nervous systems. She and her team analyzed the existing genome of Octopus bimaculoides, and demonstrated that the psychedelic drug, MDMA, produces the same social behavioral effects in octopuses as it does in humans, despite the fact that these species are separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution, and have radically divergent brain anatomy. Currently she is in the process of completing the whole genome assembly of another species of octopus, O. chierchiae, with the broader aim of making these genomic tools available to the research community. These tools will be a boon for tissue bioengineering and robotics applications, as well as the translational opportunities afforded by the comparative approach to the nervous system.

Dr. Dölen’s most promising area of inquiry arises from her lab’s observation of a novel critical period for social reward learning, as well as their discovery that this critical period can be reopened with the psychedelic drug, MDMA, but not the psychostimulant cocaine (published earlier this year in Nature, Nardou, et al 2019). Building on this discovery, she has formulated the hypothesis that this class of drugs might function to reopen critical periods across the brain. the PHATHOM project (Psychedelic Healing: Adjunct Therapy Harnessing Opened Malleability www.phathomproject.org) and predicts that this approach will lead to the resurrection of every failed clinical trial for neuropsychiatric disease that may have been thwarted by developmental constraints on brain plasticity. If she is right, this insight will herald a new age in our therapeutic approach to neuropsychiatric disease.