research Biography

Julia Lemos received a B.A. in the Biological Basis of Behavior at University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA in 2004. While at Penn, Julia did her undergraduate honors thesis (2003-2004) in the lab of Dr. Ed Cooper investigating the cellular localization of KCNQ channels. Julia spent two years as a Research Technician/Post-Baccalaureate in the laboratory of Dr. Sheryl Beck in the Stress Neurobiology group at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (2004-2006). This was a very formative time in her career. She learned ex vivo electrophysiology which became a staple technique throughout her career and where she first became interested in the stress-related neuropeptide corticotropin releasing factor. Julia joined the Neurobiology & Behavior (now Neuroscience) program at the University of Washington in Seattle. She received her Ph.D. in the summer of 2012 under the co-mentorship of Charley Chavkin and Paul Phillips. In 2012, Julia joined the laboratory of Veronica Alvarez in 2012 at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in Washington, DC. During this time, she learned to incorporate transgenics, optogenetics, and chemogenetics into her existing skill set and dove into the microcircuitry of the striatum.

In January 2018, Julia started her laboratory at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Neuroscience. Along with joining the department, she was also the first hire for the Medical Discovery Team on Addiction. First and foremost, the Lemos Laboratory is a stress neurobiology lab. One of our missions is understanding normal stress processing. The second major goal is understanding how chronic or severe stress can lead to vulnerabilities in developing disease associated phenotypes.