Dr. Lucia F. Jacobs
Dr. Lucia F. Jacobs is an Associate Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, with a primary appointment in the Department of Psychology. She is also a faculty member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Biology at Princeton University in the field of animal behavior. During her graduate years at Princeton University, she established new research directions in the study of cognition and spatial memory in free-ranging, wild rodents such as the gray squirrel. As a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, she established for the first time a link between natural spatial behavior of wild rodents and the structure of the hippocampus. This brain region, which is critical for memory, is disproportionately affected in Down syndrome. After further postdoctoral research elucidating species and sex differences in the hippocampus, Dr. Jacobs set up her laboratory at Berkeley in 1993.
Her interest in how the hippocampus encodes spatial information in rodents and humans led her to explore hippocampal deficits found in disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease and Down syndrome. Dr. Jacobs has recently developed a theoretical model of hippocampal function, which dissociates spatial mapping into multiple components (the map and the compass), mediated by different hippocampal subfields. Because spatial memory deficits seen in Down syndrome appear to dissociate in a similar manner, Dr. Jacobs is modeling this cognitive decline using spatial deficits in the trisomic Ts65Dn mouse. This is an established model for Down syndrome. The goal of Dr. Jacob’s behavioral research is to pinpoint the cognitive deficits found in Ts65Dn mice, both in spatial memory performance and in the pattern of daily changes in cognitive function and decline. By measuring performance as well as changes or reversals in early adulthood decline, these tests will be highly sensitive assays for assessing the efficacy of experimental treatments of Down syndrome.
