Bio

Bio

Dr. Katrina Choe is a neuroscientist who investigates mechanisms by which autism gene mutations disrupt social behaviour through a multi-level, integrative research strategy in animal models.

Current Focus Areas

Current Focus Areas

• Dr. Choe is interested in studying the impacts of autism-risk gene mutations on the brain’s oxytocin system and their consequences on social behaviour.
  
  McMaster News: Oxytocin could help treat some forms of autism, researchers find
  McMaster News: Brain gain: Researchers uncover how the brain’s different cells react to threats and social opportunities

Career Highlights

Career Highlights

While pursuing postdoctoral fellowship at Daniel Geschwind’s lab (UCLA), Dr. Choe integrated genetics, behavioural assays, and high-throughput whole-brain imaging to study Cntnap2 knockout (KO) mice, a well-validated model of autism. She identified widespread disruptions in social brain networks that were fully normalized by oxytocin and demonstrated that the nucleus accumbens shell is a critical site mediating oxytocin’s pro-social effects (Choe et al., 2022 Neuron).

Since establishing her laboratory at McMaster in 2020, a major focus of Dr. Choe’s lab has been understanding how oxytocin modulates the neural circuits that govern social interactions. As an initial project, the lab recorded population-level activity of GCaMP6 (a genetically encoded fluorescent calcium sensor)-expressing oxytocin neurons in freely behaving mice using in vivo fiber photometry (Sandoval et al., 2025 eNeuro). Oxytocin neurons in the paraventricular nucleus (PVN) sharply increased activity at the onset of social interaction and were also strongly activated by threatening visual stimuli but in a more sustained manner. These findings reveal that oxytocin neurons encode both social and stressful stimuli and potentially modulate the activity of downstream regions in a context specific manner.

Dr. Choe’s lab has also investigated how autism-linked mutations alter the structure of the oxytocin system. Using SHIELD tissue clearing and oxytocin immunolabelling, lightsheet microscopy, and automated 3-dimensional cell quantification, her lab generated the first complete distribution map of oxytocin neuronal distribution across the PVN (Patwardhan et al., 2025 J Neuroendocrinol). Comparisons across Cntnap2 KO and Fmr1 KO mice revealed subregion- and sex-specific differences in oxytocin neuron distribution, suggesting convergent but non-identical anatomical effects of distinct autism-associated mutations.