Dr. Swann is a neuroendocrinologist, meaning that she studies the effect of hormones on the brain. Her research mostly focuses on comparing the brains of male and female hamsters.

Dr. Swann has an undergraduate and Master’s degree in psychology from the Pennsylvania State University and Florida State University, respectively. She earned her Ph.D. in neurobiology from Northwestern University and did postdoctoral work at the University of Michigan. She joined the faculty at Rutgers in 1987 and moved to Lehigh University in 1995. She was promoted to full professor in 2008. She is also the Director of Student Success for the College of Arts and Sciences and Co-Chair of the Council for Equity and Community.

Dr. Swann is particularly interested in a part of the brain called the magnocellular medial preoptic nucleus (MPN mag, for short). In male hamsters, testosterone causes changes in the MPN mag that allow the male’s brain to respond to female pheromones. In a recent paper, Dr. Swann showed that the response of the MPN mag to testosterone depends on a protein called TrkB.

First, Dr. Swann compared the level of TrkB in normal male hamsters, castrated male hamsters, and castrated male hamsters who were treated with testosterone. She found that the level of TrkB in the MPN mag was higher in males with testosterone than those without.

Next, she used a technique called RNA interference to temporarily prevent the TrkB protein from being made in the MPN mag. After confirming in several ways that there really was less TrkB protein, she compared the copulatory behavior of these males to untreated males. She found that the males without TrkB were less likely to mate with females, but only in the short-term. (This is consistent with the temporary decrease in TrkB.) This effect was specific to the MPN mag and had to be done to both sides of the brain at the same time.

Together, these two experiments showed that TrkB is necessary for the connection between testosterone and sexual behavior, at least in male hamsters.