Rate My Professor Lindsay Halladay

Lindsay Halladay is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at The University of Arizona, where she directs the Neural Circuits, Systems, & Behavior Lab since relocating from Santa Clara University in January 2025. She earned her Ph.D. in Behavioral Neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles, conducting research on neural circuitry underlying defensive action selection in Tad Blair's lab. Halladay completed her undergraduate studies at California State University, San Bernardino, initiating research on neural circuits in the developing basal ganglia under Sanders McDougall and Cynthia Crawford. Following her doctorate, she spent four years as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Andrew Holmes's laboratory at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, investigating neural mechanisms of compulsive alcohol-seeking. From 2017 to 2025, she served as an Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at Santa Clara University, where she helped establish the Neuroscience Program, received tenure in spring 2023, and earned the Bernard Hubbard S.J. Creative Collaboration Award in 2023 for excellence in research and mentoring.

Halladay's research centers on the physiological processes by which neural activity generates behavior, particularly how reward and aversion circuits converge and interact to produce aversive learning, social behavior, and long-term consequences of early life stress. Her lab utilizes in vivo electrophysiology, robust behavioral paradigms, and state-of-the-art technologies to dissect dysfunctional circuitry implicated in psychiatric conditions. Key publications include "Astrocytes enable amygdala neural representations supporting memory" in Nature (2026), revealing astrocytes' critical role in aversive memory; "Genetically diverse mice exhibit divergent domain-specific, sex-dependent behavioral outcomes following exposure to early life stress" in PLOS One (2025); "Lasting impact of postnatal maternal separation on the developing BNST: Lifelong socioemotional consequences" in Neuropharmacology (2023); "A prefrontal-bed nucleus of the stria terminalis circuit in the regulation of fear under uncertain threat" in eLife (2020); and "A corticostriatal circuit involved in regulating punished ethanol seeking" in Biological Psychiatry (2019). Her contributions have advanced understanding of stress-related neural dynamics. Halladay has secured funding through the Young Investigator Award from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (2021, supported by the Walder Family), an NIH R15 AREA grant (2021), and a Diversity Outbred Pilot Grant from the Jackson Laboratory (2022).