Elena Halley Chartoff BS, PhD

Elena H. Chartoff, PhD, is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the Neurobiology of Motivated Behavior Laboratory at McLean Hospital. She is interested in the neurobiological mechanisms that connect depression and anxiety with drug addiction. The work in her laboratory has broad implications for understanding basic brain mechanisms that control mood and motivated behavior.

Within her wider interest, Dr. Chartoff’s laboratory focuses on sex differences in molecular and genetic contributions to addictive behaviors, the role of glutamatergic transmission in affective states and the role of kappa opioid receptors in drug withdrawal-induced depressive-like states.

Dr. Chartoff’s Neurobiology of Motivated Behavior Laboratory, founded in 2009, investigates the molecular, biochemical, and cellular mechanisms underlying drug dependence and withdrawal using animal behavioral models with high relevance to the human condition. The lab includes both females and males in their studies because there is striking evidence, both clinically and preclinically, for sex differences in every facet of the addiction cycle.

Dr. Chartoff is interested in how chronic exposure to drugs of abuse changes the brain at molecular and cellular levels such that drug withdrawal elicits a protracted constellation of negative affective signs. These include depressive- and anxiety-like signs as well as an increased sensitivity to stress and drug-associated cues, all of which work in concert to increase the likelihood of relapse. The lab concentrates on specific brain systems because their neural circuits are essential for affect and motivated behavior and become “hijacked” by repeated drug exposure.

Dr. Chartoff also studies the mechanisms by which kappa-opioid receptor systems modulate cocaine reward and the depressive-like states induced by cocaine withdrawal. She and her staff measure the effects of kappa-opioid receptor ligands on acute cocaine reward and on withdrawal from binge cocaine treatments using intracranial self-stimulation. A key finding from these studies is that kappa-opioid receptor activation is necessary for binge cocaine-induced, depressive-like states in rats.