Constantina theofanopoulou

Constantina Theofanopoulou is an Associate Research Professor at Hunter College, City University of New York, a Visiting Associate Professor at Rockefeller University and a Visiting Scholar at New York University. She is directing the Neurobiology of Social Communication lab, which is co-funded by both Hunter College and Rockefeller University. Her overall goal is to dissect the neural circuits of complex sensory motor behaviors that serve social communication, essentially, speech and dance, and to identify possible therapies for disorders that include deficits in these behaviors.

 

For her Ph.D. (Universal Ph.D title: University of Barcelona, Duke University and Rockefeller University) she worked on the neurobiology of the social reward mechanisms underlying speech, specifically on the role of oxytocin in vocal learning in songbirds and humans (e.g., Theofanopoulou et al. 2017 Proceedings B). This project led her to realize that the oxytocin/vasotocin field was suffering from an inconsistent gene nomenclature that was hampering translational research. To mitigate this, during her Post Doc (Rockefeller University), she used novel genomic methods and proposed how gene nomenclature should be revisited, aiming at a universal vertebrate gene nomenclature (e.g., Theofanopoulou & Jarvis 2023 Nature; Theofanopoulou et al. 2021 Nature).