Rate My Professor Elizabeth Holly

Elizabeth Holly is an Assistant Professor of Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey-Newark, where she joined the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience in the School of Arts and Sciences during the 2022–2023 academic year. She earned a B.S. in Experimental Psychology from Northern Michigan University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Experimental Psychology from Tufts University, receiving the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the American Psychological Association Division 28 for her doctoral work. Before her current role, Holly completed postdoctoral fellowships at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania.

Holly's research examines the systems neuroscience of stress and motivated behavior using rodent models to uncover neural circuits underlying decision-making and their disruption by stress. Her ongoing projects, supported by an NIH K01 Career Development Award, investigate the consequences of adolescent social isolation on adult value-based decisions and striatal dopamine circuits. She also received the Young Investigator Award from the Tourette Association of America for studies on decision-making and sensory processing challenges in Tourette Syndrome. Key publications include "Ventral tegmental area dopamine revisited: effects of acute and repeated stress" (Psychopharmacology, 2016), "Sex differences in behavioral and neural cross-sensitization and escalated cocaine taking as a result of episodic social defeat stress in rats" (Psychopharmacology, 2012), "Social stress and CRF–dopamine interactions in the VTA: role in long-term escalation of cocaine self-administration" (Journal of Neuroscience, 2014), "Increased mesocorticolimbic dopamine during acute and repeated social defeat stress: modulation by corticotropin releasing factor receptors in the ventral tegmental area" (Psychopharmacology, 2015), and "Striatal low-threshold spiking interneurons regulate goal-directed learning" (Neuron, 2019). Her work has advanced insights into stress-related vulnerabilities in addiction and psychiatric disorders.