Welcome to

The Woodie Lab

at George Washington University

Where neuroscience, circadian biology, and metabolism meet...

Biological rhythms regulate just about everything that organisms do. From the slime mold to you and me, behaviors, metabolism, and molecular functions are rhythmic. Desynchrony exacerbates metabolic and behavioral diseases such as obesity, diabetes, stress, and mood disorders. But how synchrony and desynchrony are communicated to maintain time-of-day-dependent homeostasis within an organism is not well characterized.

Here in the Woodie Lab, we investigate the neurobiology of chrono-metabolic rhythms. We use surgical, genetic, and dietary rodent models to identify mistimed eating sensitive neurons, disrupt their signaling, and measure the metabolic and behavioral outcomes arising from various interventions with the goal of discovering therapies for diseases exacerbated by chrono-disruption (i.e. jetlag and shiftwork).