Thirty Years of Discovery
A “greatest hits” of the lab’s science — from the first maps of the fear circuit at Michigan to today’s work at the Beckman Institute on why fear returns, and how to make it stay gone.
The lab opens
Steve Maren joins Michigan’s Biopsychology faculty and starts the lab, chasing one question: how does the brain build, store, and retrieve memories of fear?
The first NIH grant
The lab’s first federal award funds work on how the brain learns to fear a context.
A synaptic engine for emotion
A landmark proposal: long-term potentiation in the amygdala is a fundamental substrate of emotional learning and memory — framing how the brain physically stores fear.
A map of the fear circuit
A field-defining synthesis of the neurobiology of Pavlovian fear conditioning that charts the road ahead for a generation of researchers.
The flagship R01 begins
A cornerstone grant on contextual memory launches — renewed in 2008, 2015, and 2021, it funds the lab’s core work for two decades and counting.
Why fear comes back
The first evidence that the amygdala holds distinct “fear” and “safety” neurons: the same cue drives or suppresses fear depending on the context — the neural basis of fear renewal after extinction.
Timing matters
Freshly formed fear resists being unlearned — the “immediate extinction deficit,” with direct implications for how and when trauma is treated.
The lab moves to Texas
A new home in the Institute for Neuroscience, and a scaling-up of the work on how context governs fear and its extinction.
The contextual brain
A unifying framework ties the hippocampus–amygdala–prefrontal circuit to fear, extinction, and psychopathology — one of the lab’s most-cited works.
A hidden switch for extinction
The prefrontal cortex reaches the hippocampus through the thalamic nucleus reuniens to make extinction stick — a circuit for turning fear off. The same year, a new NIH grant (R01 MH117852) launches the lab’s program on stress-impaired extinction, renewed in 2023.
Tagging — and taming — a memory of fear
The first engram-tagging study in rats: labeling the very hippocampal neurons that hold a fear memory. It showed these fear engrams can be reached indirectly and pharmacologically attenuated — echoing how imaginal reminders of trauma work in people, and pointing toward new ways to treat them.
Home at the Beckman Institute
The lab moves to Illinois, where Steve becomes Director of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.
The engrams that keep fear at bay
Hippocampus-dependent context memories — and distinct “fear” and “safety” engrams in the hippocampus — are the manifold through which the nucleus reuniens regulates extinction. Reactivating hippocampal fear engrams triggers relapse, revealing how and why extinguished fear returns.
How stress jams the brain’s off-switch for fear
Under stress, locus coeruleus norepinephrine recruits basolateral amygdala projections to the prefrontal cortex, disrupting the circuit that lets extinction take hold — a mechanism for why stress makes fear so hard to unlearn, and why exposure therapy can fail.
Thirty years, and counting
Three decades of discovery — and a mission, turning the science of fear into hope, that’s only more urgent.
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