Gretchen Neigh McCandless

Gretchen Neigh McCandless, Ph.D, is an Associate Professor with the department of Anatomy and Neurobiology at Virginia Commonwealth University. She received her BA in Biology from Washington & Jefferson College before continuing on to her Ph.D in Neuroscience from Ohio State University in 2004. Her postdoctoral fellowship was with the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at Emory University. Her research focuses on neuroendocrinology, transcription factors, psychoneuroimmunology, cerebrovascular biology, affective disorders, stress-related adaptations, HIV, and sex differences, and she has teaching experience at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. 

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"The goal of my work is to provide insight into the role of cerebral vascular and metabolic compromise in the generation of affective and cognitive disorders. I focus on periods of increased plasticity and susceptibility to insults such as development, aging and disease states. My work is multidisciplinary and attends to the interplay among the nervous, cardiovascular, endocrine, reproductive, and immune systems. My work spans multiple levels of analysis ranging from behavioral to molecular"