Gül Dölen is a Turkish-American neuroscientist known for studying social behavior, psychedelic drugs and critical periods.

As an MD–PhD student at Brown University and later at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dölen studied fragile X syndrome and identified a possible treatment target. ^[1]

As a postdoctoral fellow under Robert Malenka, Dölen found that the hormones oxytocin and serotonin interact with the brain's nucleus accumbens to produce good feelings from social interactions ("social rewards") in mice. ^[2]

In 2018, Dölen co-authored a paper that found that octopuses, which are normally anti-social, became more social after exposure to the psychoactive drug MDMA, which acts on a serotonin pathway The research suggests that there is a common genetic basis of social behavior across much of the animal kingdom. ^{[2] [3]}

Dölen's recent research, published 2019–2023 in the journal Nature, examines the power of psychedelic drugs like MDMA in re-opening the critical period in social reward learning. ^{[4] [2]}

Selected publications

See also

• Critical period
• MDMA

References