Dr. Zoe Donaldson
Professor, University of Colorado, Boulder
Postdoctoral Fellow, Columbia University
PhD, Emory University
The lab was the most boring place in the world for young Zoe Donaldson. Her mother, a geohydrologist studying how pesticides break down in soil, often brought Zoe to her lab in Reno, Nevada, which was full of fragile glassware and a devastating lack of toys. “I would never want to be a scientist,” she decided. Her conviction softened years later, after a college research course that took place in the rainforests of Nicaragua, where Zoe was tasked with independently designing and carrying out her own study. For the first time in her education, she wasn’t asked to memorize facts or follow someone else’s hypothesis. Instead, she asked her own questions and discovered the beauty of using the scientific method to answer them. Now, Dr. Zoe Donaldson, Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder, studies the neuroscience of how social bonds are formed, maintained, and lost.
As a UCLA biology major with good grades, Zoe was encouraged to pursue medical school. However, after an onerous summer job spent concatenating file systems and subsequent realization that she wanted to be her own boss, Zoe decided to explore research. She interned in Dr. Susan Fahrbach’s lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign the following summer, studying how the invertebrate nervous system reorganizes during metamorphosis. Zoe found a lifelong mentor in Dr. Fahrbach, who was the first to teach her how to ask far-reaching questions and to choose the right model organisms to answer them. Zoe’s early research used model organisms spanning tobacco worms, pine bark beetles, daddy long-legs spiders, mice, and golden-collared manakins. Back at UCLA, Zoe conducted her honors thesis research under the mentorship of Dr. Barney Schlinger, supported by a Howard Hughes Undergraduate Research Fellowship. She worked on a project investigating how steroid hormone signaling impacts courtship behavior in birds. Wanting to continue exploring the neuroscience of social relationships in graduate school, Dr. Schlinger encouraged Zoe to check out Dr. Larry Young’s lab at Emory University, where she could study the neuroscience of bonding.
For her PhD in the Young lab, Zoe studied prairie voles, a species known for forming monogamous pair bonds, unlike their more promiscuous cousins, meadow and montane voles. Dr. Young was interested in how genetic variation within and between these closely related species might shape their distinct mating strategies. Working with voles presented some practical challenges: since their genome was not fully sequenced, few genetic tools existed to target and manipulate specific cell types or neuropeptides. Drawing on her experience working with invertebrates, Zoe didn’t shy away from working with a less-commonly studied organism. She even went on to develop the first transgenic prairie voles. This approach opened the door to directly probing the molecular physiology underlying complex social behaviors in voles.
At the time, the neurohormones oxytocin and vasopressin were known to shape social behavior and cognition, but the underlying mechanisms were unclear. The Young lab had shown that differences in oxytocin and vasopressin receptor expression between monogamous and promiscuous vole species contributed to species-level variation in pair bonding. Zoe wondered whether variation in vasopressin receptor regulation could explain these patterns. To study this, she transplanted a region of DNA that was thought to regulate the prairie vole’s vasopressin receptor expression into the mouse genome. Zoe thought that this would recreate a vole-like vasopressin receptor distribution in the mouse brain and, perhaps, their monogamous behavior. However, her attempted “monoga-mice” behaved just like wild types when it came to their social behavior. Instead, they differed in how they coped with stress. Although disappointed, Zoe recognized this finding was informative; it meant that the upstream region of Avpr1a alone could indeed drive species differences in gene expression and behavior but her studies did not reveal the genetic elements required for pair bonding, suggesting that another regulatory mechanism—perhaps farther away in the genome—must be involved.
After completing her PhD, and supported by a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Fellowship, Zoe joined Dr. Rene Hen’s lab at Columbia University as a postdoctoral fellow. She was interested in learning how to use the genetic tools and circuit-level approaches that were just being implemented in mice, with the goal of one day applying them to voles. In the Hen lab, Zoe studied how early-life variation in serotonin signaling shapes anxiety and social behavior. Zoe selectively knocked down the expression of the serotonin 1A autoreceptor (5-HT1A) in raphe nucleus serotonin neurons during a brief developmental window. She found that juvenile mice who experienced this transient receptor reduction showed elevated anxiety and reduced social exploration in adulthood, suggesting that 5-HT1A activity during development sets long-term social and emotional trajectories. Zoe also collaborated with Dr. Francis Champagne, a leading expert on epigenetic influences on maternal behavior, to examine how environmental factors interact with genetic variation to shape development and contribute to individual differences in anxiety and depression risk later in life.
Zoe then joined the University of Colorado Boulder as faculty, launching her independent research program with support from her NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence award. The Donaldson lab focuses on understanding the neural and genetic mechanisms that govern the formation, maintenance, and loss of social bonds. Using prairie voles as a model, Zoe’s team combines molecular and systems neuroscience approaches (in transgenic voles!), such as calcium imaging, transcriptomics, and optogenetics, to dissect how neural circuits encode social bonds. Her lab’s work has revealed how specific neuronal ensembles in the nucleus accumbens expand during bond formation, remain stable over time, and slowly erode after the loss of a partner. Their ongoing projects explore social bonding from multiple angles, including exploring dopaminergic signaling underlying bond formation and dissolution, and the neuromodulatory mechanisms and function of interbrain synchrony in pair-bonding.
Zoe’s research and mentoring philosophies center on fostering intellectual independence in her trainees. She works to cultivate a lab culture where individual trainees’ interests guide project development, much like the freedom she experienced during her college research course in Nicaragua. Thinking back, Zoe appreciates how her many mentors provided her with the freedom and safety to scientifically explore, fail, and recover. This is why she encourages her team to tackle ambitious questions, take calculated risks, and confront uncertainty and null results as a natural part of the scientific process. For Zoe, discovery arises from the courage to pursue questions without clear answers, even if it means playing around and occasionally breaking a few pieces of glassware along the way.
Find out more about Zoe and her lab’s research here.
Listen to Meenakshi’s full interview with Zoe on August 4, 2025 below!
