Sam Golden, PhD

Assistant Professor

sagolden@uw.edu

HSB F521

Director, NAPE Computational Behavior Resource
Director, Biological Structure Light Microscopy Resource

Golden Lab SimBA Github
Golden Lab SMART Github

Neural basis of social behavior and neuropsychiatric disorder

Focuses on cellular, circuit, and whole brain mechanisms underlying social motivation, with an emphasis on appetitive aggression and its interaction with neuropsychiatric disorders such as addiction and depression. We use chemogenetics, optogenetics, calcium imaging, whole-mount light-sheet fluorescent microscopy and machine-learning approaches. Please see Select Publications for further information.

Selected Publications:

Simple Behavioral Analysis (SimBA) – an open source toolkit for computer classification of complex social behaviors in experimental animals .

Nilsson SRO, Goodwin NL, Choong JJ, Hwang S, Wright HR, Norville ZC, Tong X, Lin D, Bentzley BS, Eshel N, McLaughlin RJ, Golden SA.

bioRxiv 2020.04.19.049452; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.19.049452
Aggression Addiction and Relapse: A New Frontier in Psychiatry.

Golden SA, Shaham Y

Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. 2018 01; 43 1: 224-225
Compulsive Addiction-like Aggressive Behavior in Mice.

Golden SA, Heins C, Venniro M, Caprioli D, Zhang M, Epstein DH, Shaham Y

Biological psychiatry. 2017 08; 82 4: 239-248
Persistent conditioned place preference to aggression experience in adult male sexually-experienced CD-1 mice.

Golden SA, Aleyasin H, Heins R, Flanigan M, Heshmati M, Takahashi A, Russo SJ, Shaham Y

Genes, brain, and behavior. 2017 Jan; 16 1: 44-55
Basal forebrain projections to the lateral habenula modulate aggression reward.

Golden SA, Heshmati M, Flanigan M, Christoffel DJ, Guise K, Pfau ML, Aleyasin H, Menard C, Zhang H, Hodes GE, Bregman D, Khibnik L, Tai J, Rebusi N, Krawitz B, Chaudhury D, Walsh JJ, Han MH, Shapiro ML, Russo SJ

Nature. 2016 06; 534 7609: 688-92
Excitatory transmission at thalamo-striatal synapses mediates susceptibility to social stress.

Christoffel DJ, Golden SA, Walsh JJ, Guise KG, Heshmati M, Friedman AK, Dey A, Smith M, Rebusi N, Pfau M, Ables JL, Aleyasin H, Khibnik LA, Hodes GE, Ben-Dor GA, Deisseroth K, Shapiro ML, Malenka RC, Ibanez-Tallon I, Han MH, Russo SJ

Nature neuroscience. 2015 Jul; 18 7: 962-4
Epigenetic regulation of RAC1 induces synaptic remodeling in stress disorders and depression.

Golden SA, Christoffel DJ, Heshmati M, Hodes GE, Magida J, Davis K, Cahill ME, Dias C, Ribeiro E, Ables JL, Kennedy PJ, Robison AJ, Gonzalez-Maeso J, Neve RL, Turecki G, Ghose S, Tamminga CA, Russo SJ

Nature medicine. 2013 Mar; 19 3: 337-44
A standardized protocol for repeated social defeat stress in mice.

Golden SA, Covington HE, Berton O, Russo SJ

Nature protocols. 2011 Jul; 6 8: 1183-91

Faculty

Sam Golden, PhD

Neural basis of social behavior and neuropsychiatric disorder