Alexa H. Veenema
Associate Professor
Alexa Veenema's research focuses on understanding the roles of the neuropeptides vasopressin and oxytocin in regulating social behavior.
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Dr. Veenema’s research uses mice and rats to examine the roles of vasopressin and oxytocin in regulating social behavior (social play, social recognition, social novelty, social reward) and how sex, age, and early life stress modulate social behavior. The Veenema lab employs a combination of behavioral, molecular, biochemical, and pharmacological techniques to shed light on normal and abnormal human social functioning as observed in autism spectrum disorder, borderline personality disorder, antisocial
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personality disorder, and schizophrenia.
Veenema is a referee of more than 25 international journals and a member of the Society for Neuroscience, the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies, Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology, the Society for Social Neuroscience, the Organization for the Study of Sex Differences, and the International Behavioral Neuroscience Society. She serves on the editorial board of the journals Hormones and Behavior and Social Neuroscience, is a review editor for the journals Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience and Frontiers in Endocrinology, and serves as secretary and treasurer for the Society for Social Neuroscience.
Veenema is Associate Professor in Behavioral Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience at Michigan State University. She studied Biology (specialization in Neuroscience) at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. In 2003 she received her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands with Dr. Jaap M. Koolhaas and Dr. E. Ron de Kloet as her advisors. She did post-doctoral work in the labs of Dr. Inga D. Neumann at the University of Regensburg in Germany and Dr. Geert de Vries at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In 2010, she was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Boston College and received tenure and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2016. Dr. Veenema was recruited by Michigan State University in 2017.
During her PhD, Alexa was supported by a stipend from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. She received two postdoctoral stipends from the Bavarian Research Foundation (Bayerische Forschungsstiftung) and an international research fellowship from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), and was awarded a NARSAD 2010 Young Investigator Grant from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation and an NSF Career Award in 2013. Her lab is currently funded by NSF and NIMH.
Education
University of Groningen, the Netherlands: MSc, Biology (Neuroscience concentration) | 1997
University of Groningen, the Netherlands: PhD, Behavioral Neuroscience | 2003
University of Regensburg, Germany: postdoctoral fellow,
University of Massachusetts, Amherst: postdoctoral fellow,
Selected Press
Dr. Alexa Veenema won the 2019 Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentor of the Year Award for MSU
Michigan State University | 2019-05-29
Dr. Alexa Veenema, associate professor of behavioral neuroscience, won the 2019 Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentor of the Year Award for Michigan State University. This annual award recognizes faculty who have demonstrated an outstanding commitment to mentoring undergraduate researchers.
Recent Grants Strengthen Psychology's Focus on Research
The Boston College Chronicle | 2014-10-02
Assistant Professor Alexa Veenema is the recipient of a five-year National Institutes of Health RO1 award of $1.7 million. The grant will enable her to study the neural circuits underlying social play behavior in juvenile rats and how these neural circuits differ between males and females. Social play is a highly rewarding behavior and has been shown to be important for the development of social skills in humans and rodents, Veenema explained.
The Making of a Bully
The Scientist | 2013-01-25
The stress protocol only seemed to bear long-term effects in young adolescent rats, however; the same stress protocol on healthy adult rats, failed to produce similar behavioral changes. This suggests that trauma incurred early in life, but not in adulthood, can deeply interfere with the neural programming and physiology, thereby setting the stage for aggressive manifestations in adult life. “These findings are in line with and extend further those using other rodent and non-human primate models in which early life stress, as opposed to stress in adulthood, can cause long-lasting increases in aggressive behaviors,” neuroscientist Alexa Veenema of Boston College wrote in an e-mail.
Media Assets
2017 Neuroscience Retreat
Standup Science 2019
Veenema Lab - 2019