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Dani Dumitriu, MD, PhD, is a pediatrician and neuroscientist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City. She was born in Romania and grew up south of Stockholm, Sweden, prior to moving to the United States for her education. She completed her physician-scientist training, pediatric residency, and a pediatric environmental health fellowship at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, also in New York City, and was the first female to secure R01-level independent funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) during clinical training. She currently spends 20% time as a hospitalist in the Well Baby Nursery and 80% time conducting research into the mechanisms of emotional connection and resilience across species and investigational scales in her dual roles as Principal Investigator of the Developmental Origins of Resilience (DOOR) lab and as the newly announced Director of the Nurture Science Program. Her most recent research in animal models seeks to understand neuroconnectomic differences between stress-susceptible and stress-resilient mice, with a focus on pre-stress patterns in inbred mice housed in homogenous conditions. In a recent publication, her team identified both structural and functional differences in the prelimbic cortex to amygdala circuit mediating trait susceptibility to an acute social defeat stressor in C57 mice. Her most recent research in humans focuses on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the generation born during these uncertain and changing times, and she is the founder and Chair of Columbia University's COVID-19 Mother Baby Outcomes (COMBO) Initiative. In a recent publication, her team showed that in utero exposure to the pandemic environment, but not to maternal SARS-CoV-2 infection during pregnancy, leads to small but significant decrements in motor and social skills at 6 months of age.  

@theDOORlab 

Welcome to this exciting seminar!  

Tuomas Aivelo 

Selected publications: 

Grossman YS, Fillinger C, Manganaro A, Voren G, Waldman R, Zou T, Janssen WG, Kenny PJ, *Dumitriu D. Structure and function differences in the prelimbic cortex to basolateral amygdala circuit mediate trait vulnerability in a novel model of acute social defeat stress in male mice. Neuropsychopharmacology 2022; Feb 47(3):788-799  

Bianco C, Sania A, Kyle MH, Beebe B, Barbosa J, Bence M, Coskun L, Fields A, Firestein MR, Goldman S, Hane A, Hott V, Hussain M, Hyman S, Lucchini M, Marsh R, Mollicone I, Myers M, Ofray D, Pini N, Rodriguez C, Shuffrey LC, Tottenham N, Welch MG, Fifer W, Monk C, *Dumitriu D, Amso D. Pandemic beyond the virus: maternal COVID-related postnatal stress is associated with infant temperament. Pediatric Research 2022 [April 20, 2022, online ahead of print]  

Shuffrey LC, Firestein MR, Kyle MH, Fields A, Alcántara C, Amso D, Austin J, Bain JM, Barbosa JR, Bence M, Bianco C, Fernández CR, Goldman S, Gyamfi-Bannerman C, Hott V, Hu Y, Hussain M, Factor-Litvak P, Lucchini M, Mandel A, Marsh R, McBrian D, Mourad M, Muhle R, Noble KG, Penn AA, Rodriguez C, Sania A, Silver WG, O’Reilly KC, Stockwell M, Tottenham N, Welch MG, Zork N, Fifer WP, M C, *Dumitriu D. Association of birth during the COVID-19 pandemic with neurodevelopmental status at 6 months in infants with and without in utero exposure to maternal SARS-CoV-2 infection. Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics; 176(6):e215563 [Jan 4, 2022, online ahead of print] 

Anderson KR, Harris JA, Ng L, Prins P, Memar S, Ljungquist B, Furth D, Williams RW, Ascoli GA, *Dumitriu D. (2021) Highlights from the era of open source web-based tools. Journal of Neuroscience 2021; 41(5): 927-936 

*Dumitriu D, Rodriguez A, Morrison JH. High-throughput, detailed, cell-specific neuroanatomy of dendritic spines using microinjection and confocal microscopy. Nature Protocols 2011; Aug 25; 6(9): 1391-411  

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