Erin Calipari

Calipari is the oldest daughter of John Calipari, an American basketball coach, and Ellen Calipari.[1] Calpiari took part in athletics whilst attending White Station High School. She played softball, basketball and hockey. She was part of the first generation in her family to attend to become an academic.[2] Calipari attended University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she studied biology and played for the UMass Minutewomen.[3] Calpari was a graduate student at Wake Forest University, where she earned a doctorate in neuropharmacology under the supervision of Sara Jones.[4] She used analytical chemistry and operant behaviour studies to understand how dopamine kinetics are impact by drug self-administration.[2] Calipari was a postdoctoral research associate in a genetics laboratory at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.[5][6] She focussed on how to understand neural circuit activity and transcriptional programs.[2]

Calipari joined Vanderbilt University in 2017.[7] She works on the brain circuitry that is used for adaptive and maladaptive neurological processes including reward, associative learning and motivation, and how these are associated with psychiatric disease.[5][8][9] In Tennessee, where Calipari grew up, there are more prescriptions for opioids than there are people living in the state.[5] Calipari believes that drug addiction is a decision-making disease: people make decisions to choose to invest in drugs over other expenses. She looks at which parts of the brain are involved with making decisions, and how to reprogram them to make other choices.[5] Her lab use fibre photometry calcium imaging, which monitors neural activity in subpopulations of neurons using an optical fibers, optogenetics, and fast-scan cyclic voltammetry.[10] She is interested in why women are vulnerable to drug addiction, and how the immune system could be used to fight the opioid epidemic.[11][12] She believes that through the platform of sport it is possible to communicate the dangers of drug addiction.[13][14]

Whilst women are more susceptible to drug addiction, the majority of addiction studies are focussed on men.[15] This means that medication development has focussed on correcting addiction in men, and may explain why women do not respond to treatment in the same way as men.[15] Calipari found that when hormones related to fertility are high, women make stronger associations to clues in their environment and more likely to seek rewards, which makes them more prone to drug addiction and relapse.[5][15][16] Her research can be used by treatment centres to educate women about their decision making mechanisms.[15]

• López AJ, Siciliano CA, Calipari ES. Activity-Dependent Epigenetic Remodeling in Cocaine Use Disorder. Handb Exp Pharmacol. 2019;10.1007/164_2019_257. doi:10.1007/164_2019_257[17]
• Brady LJ, Hofford RS, Tat J, Calipari ES, Kiraly DD. Granulocyte-Colony Stimulating Factor Alters the Pharmacodynamic Properties of Cocaine in Female Mice. ACS Chem Neurosci. 2019;10(10):4213–4220. doi:10.1021/acschemneuro.9b00309[17]
• Fakira AK, Peck EG, Liu Y, et al. The role of the neuropeptide PEN receptor, GPR83, in the reward pathway: Relationship to sex-differences. Neuropharmacology. 2019;157:107666. doi:10.1016/j.neuropharm.2019.107666[17]
• Zhang H, Chaudhury D, Nectow AR, et al. α1- and β3-Adrenergic Receptor-Mediated Mesolimbic Homeostatic Plasticity Confers Resilience to Social Stress in Susceptible Mice. Biol Psychiatry. 2019;85(3):226–236. doi:10.1016/j.biopsych.2018.08.020[17]

Calpari is married to Cody Siciliano, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University.

• Erin Calipari publications indexed by Google Scholar