About us

The Giardino laboratory (est. 2021) is located in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine. The lab is also a part of Stanford’s Center for Sleep and Circadian Sciences, Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, and Bio-X.

We are interested in understanding the underlying neural circuitry of psychiatric conditions of stress, sleep disturbances, and substance use. We use advanced technologies for precisely mapping, monitoring, and manipulating neurocircuits that drive hedonic and homeostatic states in mouse models. 

Projects in the lab are currently funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Whitehall Foundation, and the Brain Research Foundation.

Topics of interest to the lab include:

• Stress & reward

• Drug addiction

• Sex differences

• Wakefulness/arousal

• Neuropeptide release & signaling

• Feeding & metabolism

Approaches we use:

• Neuromodulation - optogenetics, chemogenetics

• Neurophysiological recordings - fiber photometry, calcium imaging, EEG/EMG

• Neurogenetics - CRISPR/Cas9 editing, Cre/loxP recombination, viral gene transfer, mouse genetics

• Neuroanatomy - circuit tracing, immunohistochemistry, in situ hybridization, confocal & light sheet microscopy

• Neuropharmacology - alcohol & drug self-administration, receptor mechanisms

• Computation - neural circuit modeling, machine learning analysis of behavioral & physiological datasets

• Behavior and evolution - rodent model organisms, cross-species comparisons

• Translation - interdisciplinary and clinical collaborations, treatment development