Carla Yuede, Ph.D.
Carla Yuede, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Psychiatry Department at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, MO. She graduated from Missouri State University in 2000 with a BS in Psychology and Biomedical Science, and received her Ph.D in Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Missouri – St. Louis. During graduate school, she began a collaboration with the newly formed Animal Behavior Core (ABC) at Washington University and completed her dissertation research on the long-term behavioral effects of neonatal NMDA receptor antagonism under the guidance of Dr. David Wozniak (Psychiatry) in the lab of Dr. John Olney (Psychiatry). Following graduation, she completed a postdoc studying the effects of stress on Alzheimer’s disease pathology with Dr. John Csernansky (Psychiatry). In 2012, she became faculty in the Neurology department at Washington University working with Dr. John Cirrito to develop micro-immunoelectrodes (MIEs) to study rapid kinetics of beta amyloid and other peptides involved in Alzheimer’s disease. With the Cirrito lab, the MIE technology has been optimized and expanded to detect several different proteins and peptides, including SARS-CoV-2. Dr. Yuede is currently the Director of the Animal Behavior Core Laboratory at Washington University. The Animal Behavior Core Lab routinely conducts functional assessment analyses on a wide range of pre-clinical rodent models. The lab focuses on behavioral tests in six functional domains: 1) sensorimotor functions; 2) learning and memory; 3) altered emotionality; 4) social behaviors and interactions; and 5) sensory-based behaviors, to examine the behavioral consequences of gene mutations as well as assess the effects of specific drugs, experimental manipulations (e.g., neuronal loss, stress), or altered development on behavior in laboratory rodents. Dr. Yuede’s primary research focus is on the mechanisms underlying biological/physiological changes occurring in the brain leading to impairments or improvements in memory function.