Laura DeNardo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physiology at UCLA.  She received her BA in Molecular and Cell Biology from UC Berkeley, her PhD in Neuroscience from UC San Diego, and completed her postdoctoral training at Stanford University with Dr Liqun Luo. Laura joined the UCLA faculty in 2019. She has received several prestigious awards including a Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship in Neuroscience and a Janett Rosenberg Trubatch Career Development Award from the Society for Neuroscience.

The DeNardo Lab brings together fields of synaptic development, behavioral circuit mapping, and early life stress to investigate the normal developmental trajectories in brain centers for emotion and cognition and how these trajectories are affected by early life stress. Stress is one of the biggest risk factors for developing mental illnesses. She is using advanced approaches in systems neuroscience to reveal the brain developmental mechanisms by which early life stress may lead to altered cognitive and emotional behaviors. 

The DeNardo Lab