Gregory Quirk, PhD

Gregory Quirk is an Associate Professor of Neuroscience at Ponce School of Medicine, in Puerto Rico. Quirk did his undergraduate studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. He received his doctorate in Neuroscience in 1990 from State University of New York Health Sciences Center in Brooklyn, NY, working on the spatial firing on neurons in the hippocampal formation in the laboratory of Robert Muller. Departing from the usual career track, he obtained a Fulbright grant to establish the first laboratory of neuroscience in Honduras, at the National Medical School in Tegucigalpa. His work in Honduras also included a study of the traumatic effects of political repression on the mental health of victims' families.

From 1993-97, he worked in the laboratory of Joseph LeDoux at NYU studying the activity of neurons in the amygdala and related structures during fear learning. His work provided important physiological support for LeDoux's hypothesis that the amygdala learns fear associations (between tones and shocks) via direct subcortical projections from the thalamus (LeDoux's "low road" to the amygdala). At that time, he also became interested in extinction of fear, or how conditioned fear is reduced.

In keeping with his interests in spurring science in developing countries, Quirk joined the faculty at Ponce School of Medicine 1997, and decided to focus exclusively on the question extinction. After learning to become afraid of something, how do we learn to stop being afraid once the danger is gone? His group has shown that the medial prefrontal cortex is critical for remembering extinction, and that prefrontal cells signal extinction memory. Furthermore, electrical stimulation of this area in rats can strengthen extinction memory, suggesting that the medial prefrontal cortex may be a useful target for future therapies for PTSD, in which fear extinction is compromised. Quirk's research is funded by National Institute of Mental Health. In 1999, he received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, from President Bill Clinton, for his work on extinction of fear.