Marina Wolf
American neuroscientist
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Wolf was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She received her B.A. in biochemistry (with highest distinction) from Northwestern University. Here she received her introduction to neuroscience research working in the laboratory of Dr. Aryeh Routtenberg and later in the laboratory of Dr. David U'Prichard. Wolf earned her doctoral degree in Pharmacology in 1986 at Yale University under the mentorship of Dr. Robert Henry Roth. She was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Gregory Kapatos at the Center for Cell Biology at Sinai Hospital of Detroit, now Sinai-Grace Hospital, affiliated with Wayne State University. She was Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Wayne State University before moving to the Chicago Medical School at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine & Science in 1992 where she rose through the ranks, serving as Chair of Neuroscience from 2003 to 2018. She moved to OHSU in 2018.
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Research
As a Ph.D. student, postdoctoral fellow, and in the early years of her laboratory at Wayne State University, Dr. Wolf's work focused on fundamental properties of dopamine neurons and their relationship to antipsychotic drug action. At Wayne State, many of her colleagues studied the neurobiological basis of drug addiction. She therefore learned about prominent theories of addiction, all of which focused on events intrinsic to dopamine neurons. Excited by the groundbreaking work on glutamate receptors and LTP that was coming out at the time, she hypothesized in the late 1980s that the cascade leading to addiction might depend upon glutamate and synaptic plasticity. Her laboratory went on to use behavioral, biochemical, cell biological and electrophysiological approaches to demonstrate that glutamate synapses in the reward circuitry, especially the nucleus accumbens, undergo complex plasticity after exposure to drugs of abuse and that this plasticity in some cases plays a causal role in behavioral changes that model drug addiction. Her lab continues to characterize synaptic plasticity during abstinence from stimulants and opioids, and to test strategies to harness the understanding of drug-induced synaptic plasticity to develop therapeutic approaches to aid in recovery from substance use disorder.
Select publications
Wolf ME (1998) The role of excitatory amino acids in behavioral sensitization to psychomotor stimulants. Progress in Neurobiology 54:679-720. PMID 9560846
Wolf ME (2010) The Bermuda triangle of cocaine-induced neuroadaptations. TINS 33:391-398. PMC2935206
Wolf ME, Tseng KY (2012) Calcium-permeable AMPA receptors in the VTA and nucleus accumbens after cocaine exposure: when, how and why? Front Molecular Neurosci 5:72. PMC3384237
Wolf ME (2016) Synaptic mechanisms underlying persistent cocaine craving. Nat Rev Neurosci 17:351-365. PMC5466704