Dr. Valtcheva did her Bachelor’s in Biology and earned a Master’s degree in Neuroscience from the University Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris. Her graduate work with Dr. Laurent Venance at College de France, Paris, was focused on the rules governing spike-timing-dependent plasticity in the striatum. She found that that astrocytes, via the uptake of glutamate, act as a filter for incoming cortical information, thus gating relevant inputs eligible to induce long-term synaptic plasticity in the striatum. Her graduate research was fully supported by grants from the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research and Ecole Normale Superieure. After completing her PhD, Dr. Valtcheva received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Fyssen Foundation (France) and started her postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. Robert C. Froemke at NYU Langone Health. Currently, she is studying the neural circuits of maternal care and oxytocin release, using in vivo whole-cell recordings of optically-identified oxytocin neurons in awake mice, combined with viral tracing approaches. She is interested in what mechanisms gate experience-dependent changes in the sensitivity to infant cues in the newly-maternal brain to enable oxytocin release from the paraventricular hypothalamus.
