Dr. Melón is a neuroscientist who tries to understand how binge-drinking can lead to alcoholism and why that is more likely to occur in some people than others.

Dr. Melón became interested in the biology of how the brain responds to alcohol as an undergraduate at Middlebury College, where she was a Posse scholar. She earned a Master’s at the State University of New York at Binghamton, and then continued on to a Ph.D. in Addiction Neuroscience from Purdue University. She recently completed a postdoc at Tufts University and joined the faculty at Wesleyan last summer.

Previous research has shown that alcohol affects neurons in a similar way to the neurotransmitter GABA, which is an inhibitory signal in the brain. Both GABA and alcohol can cause loss of coordination and increased anxiety. This research has also shown that binge drinking decreases the number of GABA receptors, which receive the signal from GABA/alcohol. This decrease in GABA receptors is thought to increase alcohol tolerance, creating a feedback loop with higher consumption: binge drinking leads to fewer GABA receptors, which increases tolerance, causing the person to drink more to feel the effect, leading to even fewer GABA receptors and even higher tolerence, and so on.

In a recent study, Dr. Melón and colleagues studied male and female mice who were given access to alcohol every few hours for 14 days. As had been shown before, this method led the mice to binge drink. After removing access to alcohol, the mice went into withdrawal and were slower to explore compared to mice that had only drank water. This increased anxiety behavior was associated with an increase in the GABA receptors in one specific type of neurons but no change in other types of neurons.

So they next created mice that didn’t have any of this GABA receptor in that type of neurons. The effect of this genetic change was different between the male and female mice. Specifically, it only increased binge-drinking in males, suggesting that the GABA receptor was somehow limiting how much they drank. However, both males and females became hyperactive in response to alcohol and both were less impaired by drinking. In addition, the mice without the GABA receptor displayed less anxiety during withdrawal.

Dr. Melón concluded that the GABA receptors in this type of neuron are important for the development of binge drinking behavior and that they seem to be involved in the balance between the sedative effects of alcohol and the rewarding effects of alcohol. She is interested in continuing to study how and why alcohol affects men and women differently.