Todd Ahern
Graduate Student
todd.h.ahern@gmail.com
I am currently a graduate student in the neuroscience program at Emory University (Atlanta, GA). My dissertation work is being conducted in the laboratory of Larry Young.
Since joining the Young Lab, my overarching interest has been how social environment, both neonatally and in adulthood, affects behavior. On a experimental level, I am using the prairie vole to study the effects of early rearing conditions on differences in emotionality and social behavior of adult offspring, as well as the brain mechanisms underlying these differences. Prairie voles are socially monogamous and biparental. Thus the use of prairie voles in this manner will complement and extend work done in uniparental, nonmonogamous rats over the last several decades, potentially providing new insights into human social and emotional development.
Before coming to Emory, I was an undergraduate at Oberlin College (Oberlin, OH), after which I spent two years (2002-2004) as a research assistant with Jill Goldstein at Harvard Medical School and Center for Morphometric Analysis. I have also worked in the labs of Claudio Mello (2001), David Weinshenker (2005), and Yoland Smith (2006), and am a member of the Center of Behavioral Neuroscience (CBN; Atlanta, GA), and the Integrated Training in Psychobiology and Psychopathology training grant (Emory University).
Outside of science, I spend time with my wife, Erika J. Ahern, who recently completed her Master's in Philosophy (Emory University), and our two beautiful daughters, Miriam and Isabella.