Henry Hallock

I strive to give my students hands-on experience as practicing neuroscientists. My goal as a teacher, therefore, is to create avenues for students to apply their knowledge to unanswered questions about the brain. I teach my students that anybody can be a neuroscientist—all of us use the scientific method to answer questions about our world, even if we don’t realize it. I emphasize critical thinking (coming up with a solution to a problem) and communication (articulating the solution and the problem) in my classes. I believe these two skills are paramount for the success of our students in their post-Lafayette lives. 

I love seeing things “click” for my students. Selfishly, teaching is really rewarding for me because I feel like I am having a direct impact on my students’ lives. I love pushing my students to think beyond their textbooks and have the courage to tackle really hard and complex scientific (and societal) problems. I love seeing them gain the confidence to work through problems that don’t have narrow solutions because neuroscience demands this skill set. The brain is really complex, and truly understanding it will require a lot of hard work and determination. Fortuitously, courage, hard work, and determination are also traits that generalize well to many other areas of life beyond the study of the nervous system.  

In Introduction to Neuroscience, I give students their first taste of topics in neuroscience, and neuroscience research. We cover a broad array of material, including genetics, cells, movement, sleep, stress, memory, and everything in between. We critically read and analyze cutting-edge neuroscience research articles, and design our own experiments using state-of-the-art techniques. 

In Psychopharmacology, students learn about drugs—how drugs affect the brain and body, where drugs come from, how drugs are politicized, and how drugs are monetized. 

Introduction to Neural Data Analysis is a class I created that teaches students how to use the Python programming language to work with neuroscience data. In this class, students and I code together using interactive notebooks, and students ultimately create a scientific poster that details the results of an original analysis of an open data source. Students come away from this class with a detailed knowledge of how to create functional code, how to interpret many different kinds of neuroscience data, how to organize data, and how to visualize their data. In a world where we are collecting more data all of the time, an understanding of how to interpret data is a necessary skill for the practicing neuroscientist.

Advanced Neuroscience is a capstone course in which senior neuroscience students engage in in-depth discussion of scholarly neuroscience articles, as well as topics that affect the neuroscience community (systemic racism in grant funding, inclusion of biological males and females in scientific studies, and the utility of next-generation antidepressant treatments, as examples).

I am interested in what the brain is doing when we make decisions. I am particularly interested in two parts of this process: attention (seeing that the traffic light is “green”) and memory (remembering that “green” means “go”). I tackle this problem by studying mice. Although mouse brains are obviously very different from our brains in many respects, there are many brain areas and associated functions that are conserved between mice and humans, and looking at mouse brains is relatively easy. We test attention and memory in our mice by teaching them to do tasks in which they are rewarded (with some strawberry milkshake) for paying attention to/remembering the location of visual stimuli on a touchscreen. Our lab takes a holistic view of understanding what the brain is doing during these tasks—we measure electrical activity in brain cells during these tasks, turn parts of the brain “on” or “off” before mice do these tasks, and investigate how the activity of specific genes correlates with behavior during these tasks. Understanding these things will give us insight into how the brain functions normally, and will also give us a window into understanding why people with disorders like schizophrenia, ADHD, or depressive disorder have problems with attention and memory.

I got into neuroscience through my own experiences in the classroom of an engaging professor as an undergraduate in psychology. It was a revelation to me that things like memory and experience could be studied empirically. 

Lafayette has the ideal mixture of resources that allow me to conduct high-impact research and teaching that allow me to foster close relationships with students, both in my lab and in the classroom. I knew that I wanted a job where I could both teach and do high-quality research, and Lafayette strikes that balance really well. It’s a place where I feel like part of a community of scholars and learners, and I love getting fresh perspectives on my own work through seeing what my colleagues across the College are doing.

Exploratory/Developmental Research Grant Program (R21), National Institute of Mental Health (2023)

Young Investigator Award, Brain and Behavior Research Foundation (2021)

Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA), National Institute of Mental Health (2019)

Travel Award, Society of Biological Psychology (SOBP) (2020)

Rising Star Award, Society of Biological Psychology (SOBP) (2019)

My website

Hallock, H.L., Adiraju, S.S., Miranda-Barrientos, J., McInerney, J.M., Oh, S., DeBrosse, A.C., Li, Y., Carr, G.V., & Martinowich, K. (2023). Electrophysiological correlates of attention in the locus coeruleus-prelimbic cortex circuit during the rodent continuous performance test. Neuropsychopharmacology, doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-023-01692-3

Rodriguez, L.A., Kim, S., Page, S.C., Nguyen, C.V., Pattie, E.A., Hallock, H.L., *Valerino, J., Maynard, K.R., Jaffe, A.E., & Martinowich, K. (2023). The basolateral amygdala to lateral septum circuit is critical for regulating social novelty in mice. Neuropsychopharmacology, 48: 529-539

Stout, J.J., Hallock, H.L., George, A.E., Adiraju, S.S., & Griffin, A.L. (2022). The ventral midline thalamus coordinates prefrontal-hippocampal neural synchrony during vicarious trial and error. Scientific Reports, 12: 10940

Hallock, H.L., *Quillian, H.M., Maynard, K.R., *Mai, Y., Chen, H-Y., Hamersky, G.R., Shin, J.H., Maher, B.J., Jaffe, A.E., & Martinowich, K. (2020). Molecularly-defined hippocampal inputs regulate population dynamics in the prelimbic cortex to suppress context fear memory retrieval. Biological Psychiatry, 88: 554-565

Maynard, K.R., Kardian, A., Hill, J.L., *Mai, Y., Barry, B., Hallock, H.L., Jaffe, A.E., & Martinowich, K. (2020). TrkB signaling influences gene expression in cortistatin-expressing interneurons. eNeuro, 7: 10.1523/ENEURO.0310-19.2019

Hallock, H.L., *Quillian, H.M., *Mai, Y., Maynard, K.R., & Martinowich, K. (2019). Manipulation of a genetically and spatially defined sub-population of BDNF-expressing neurons potentiates learned fear and decreases hippocampal-prefrontal synchrony in mice. Neuropsychopharmacology, 44: 2239-2246

Hill, J.L., Jimenez, D.V., *Mai, Y., Maynard, K.R., Hardy, N.F., Hallock, H.L., Ren, M., Chen, H-Y., Yang, F., Maher, B.J., Schloesser, R.J., & Martinowich, K. (2018). Cortistatin interneurons require TrkB signaling to prevent brain hyper-excitability. Brain Structure and Function, 224: 471-483

Hallock, H.L., Wang, A., & Griffin, A.L. (2016). Ventral midline thalamus is critical for hippocampal-prefrontal synchrony and spatial working memory. The Journal of Neuroscience, 36: 8372-8389

*Layfield, D., *Patel, M.M., Hallock, H.L., & Griffin, A.L. (2015). Inactivation of the nucleus reuniens/rhomboid causes a delay-dependent impairment of spatial working memory. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 125: 163-167

Hallock, H.L., Wang, A., *Shaw, C.L., & Griffin, A.L. (2013). Transient inactivation of the thalamic reuniens and rhomboid nuclei produces deficits of a working memory-dependent tactile-visual conditional discrimination T-maze task. Behavioral Neuroscience, 127: 860-866