Valery Grinevich joins the ZI Mannheim as Department Head of "Neuropeptide research in psychiatry"

Prof. Dr. Valery Grinevich has joined the Central Institute for Mental Health (ZI) in Mannheim as Department Head for of the new department "Neuropeptide research in psychiatry". Valery was one of the first five Schaller Group leaders recruited by the Chica and Heinz Schaller Foundation in 2012 and since then headed his laboratory focusing on neuropeptide research. Since 2015, he is a principal investigator in the Heidelberg Pain Consortium, Project B02.

In Mannheim his department will focus on the dissection of the mechanisms of neuropeptide action in the brain, from molecular – via anatomical – to the whole organism level. They are employing viral, opto- and chemogenetical, electrophysiological  and behavioral approaches to study the effects of various neuropeptides (primarily oxytocin, OT) within the distinct brain regions controlling stress and fear responses, maternal and social behavior.

Excitingly, his group's most recent work was just published in Neuron:

"A Fear Memory Engram and Its Plasticity in the Hypothalamic Oxytocin System”, Neuron. 2019, doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2019.04.029.