Spotlight: Rose Larios
Rose Larios is a senior PhD student nearing degree completion in the UC San Francisco Neuroscience Program. She was born and raised in Queens, and her hobbies include Muay Thai, dancing, scuba diving, hiking and backpacking.
Though Rose has long been interested in how the brain drives behavior, she was ultimately moved to pursue neuroscience research by her experiences with mental health growing up. She saw how psychiatric diseases affect not only individuals but their communities and hoped to contribute to the demystification and destigmatization of psychiatric diseases by studying their neural bases.
Rose felt particularly compelled to study deficits in social attachment due to the breadth and depth of the influence social attachment has on society. It drives and underlies central features of human civilization such as art, war and government, and it can also be a core component of diseases ranging from autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to dementia and depression.
It’s something I care about both just for the mystery and experience of being human and for wanting to help an untreated need that’s really affecting people’s quality of life.
To study the effects of genetic and situational factors on social attachment, Rose works with the prairie vole, unique amongst rodent models for the enduring, irreplaceable monogamous pair bonds the adults form.
Rose was studying sex-specific effects of early life stress on social attachment during vole adulthood when a pivotal moment in her graduate work arose — she achieved a breakthrough in one of her side projects. She had successfully generated multiple novel genetic lines with somatic mutations in a gene consistently implicated in symptoms of autism: SHANK3.
At the time, the prairie vole genome was relatively undescribed, so the creation of these genetically modified voles was especially challenging but all the more rewarding once achieved. These were the first rodents in which neuroscientists could study the effects of SHANK3 mutations on enduring social attachment in adulthood.
Rose found that one of these mutations diminishes the bond a female vole forms to her male partner but does not affect a male vole’s bond to his female partner. She hopes that her work has carved out an area in which others can further study which parts of SHANK3 are relevant to social attachment and sex-specific differences.
Describing genetic and neural mechanisms underlying the symptoms of psychiatric diseases reduces stigma surrounding those diseases — a process to which Rose hopes her work contributes. She cares deeply about reducing stigma, in part because one of her passions is increasing accessibility of mental health resources.
Being able to present [a psychiatric disease] more medically than it’s been historically presented I think is helpful for increasing accessibility to treatments or decreasing stigma to seek help. Anything I can do to just add a piece of the puzzle of that feels important, and I’m happy I’m contributing to that.
For the past few years, Rose has also been helping with treatment sessions in a clinical trial delivering MDMA-assisted psychotherapy to patients suffering from PTSD (MAPS). She has seen firsthand the impact that access to effective treatment can have in the lives of individuals whose needs are unmet.
This has made even more troubling for Rose the disparity between her career experiences and the reality lived by many in communities she assists or of which she’s a member.
In a place like UCSF, I’m seeing the cutting edge treatments and then seeing communities where people can’t get the most basic of treatments. Something’s been feeling really distant for me for the past couple of years, and I need to settle that.
This perspective has shaped Rose’s keen understanding of the multifaceted nature of mental health resource accessibility. While the creation of novel treatments for symptoms insufficiently addressed by current therapies is a necessity, so is bringing existing mental health resources to more of the communities that need them.
While Rose is interested in continuing to pursue work in clinical studies after she graduates, she is also drawn toward working within efforts to increase access to basic mental health resources by changing the culture around mental health or contributing to the growth of telemedicine and intelligent healthcare platforms.