Brenda Bloodgood

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Brenda Bloodgood is an American neuroscientist and associate professor of neurobiology at the University of California, San Diego. Her research looks at how brain circuits change when an animal interacts with its environment.

Her journey into science began in high school with Columbia University’s Science Honors Program. She started her college path at a California community college before transferring to UC San Diego to study Animal Physiology and Neuroscience. As an undergraduate, she worked in Ed Callaway’s lab at the Salk Institute. She earned her BS in 2001 and went on to Harvard Medical School for a PhD with Bernardo Sabatini, where she studied synaptic physiology and published a first-author paper in Science about how neuronal activity affects diffusion at dendritic spines.

After her PhD, Bloodgood stayed in Boston for a postdoctoral stint with Mike Greenberg at Harvard Medical School. There she studied Npas4, a protein that helps control gene expression at inhibitory synapses. She discovered that sensory stimulation reorganizes inhibitory synapses on hippocampal neurons, which lowers immediate information output but increases the neuron’s potential for dendritic plasticity and future learning.

In 2012 she returned to UC San Diego to start her own lab in neurobiology. Her work continues to explore how Npas4 shapes neural computation and behavior. In 2014, her group was part of Obama’s BRAIN Initiative funding. In 2016, she became co-director of the San Diego Brain Consortium, and she serves on the Advisory Board of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind at UCSD.

Her lab has also shown functional differences in NMDA receptors on different parts of neurons (spines versus dendritic inputs) onto a group of interneurons in the mouse cortex. They found that Npas4 can be induced by action potentials in a different way than by excitatory signals, and although both paths produce Npas4, they affect gene expression in distinct ways.

In 2024 a paper from Bloodgood’s lab in Cell was retracted after investigators found manipulated data by the paper’s first author. While the misconduct was committed by that author, Bloodgood, as the principal investigator, bore responsibility for the work published under her lab. She co-signed the retraction, notified NIH and the journal, and supported her students through the ensuing process.