Dr. Stephanie Correa
Assistant Professor Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology, University of California, Los Angeles
Postdoctoral Fellow University of California, San Fransico
PhD in Neurobiology & Behavior, Cornell University
Dr. Stephanie Correa didn’t grow up dreaming of becoming a neuroscientist. In fact, she was initially intimidated by the brain and didn’t touch one until her second postdoc. As a first-generation college student, she was encouraged to follow the conventional wisdom: if you’re good at science and math, you go to medical school. However, everything changed for Stephanie during her study abroad trip to Ecuador in college, when she found herself at a comparative ecology field site in the mountains. At dawn and dusk she watched the mating displays of birds and asked her own scientific questions about their behavior. “Woah, people get paid to do this?” she thought. That spark launched Stephanie’s winding path through field biology, reproductive physiology, and ultimately into the neural circuits that link steroid hormones to behavior and metabolism. This is the story of how a self-proclaimed “hormone nerd” who once feared the brain came to embrace its complexity—and how her commitment to mentorship and collaborative discovery is shaping the future of neuroendocrinology.
Upon returning to southern California after studying abroad, Stephanie sought out ways to pursue research during her remaining time at Pomona College. She applied for and received an NSF-funded position in the lab of Dr. Rachel Levin, studying house wrens. At the time, the Levin lab was examining how circulating hormones and breeding season length influenced hormone-behavior relationships across different altitudes and latitudes. After two years of early mornings and long days outside, Stephanie realized that she didn’t want to spend her whole career in the field. Instead, she desired a more controlled lab environment where she could ask mechanistic questions about the relationships between hormones and behavior. This interest led her to pursue her PhD across the country in the lab of Dr. Elizabeth Adkins-Regan at Cornell University in upstate New York.
Stephanie was drawn to the unique balance of lab and field research the Adkins-Regan lab used to study neuroendocrine mechanisms shaping sexual differentiation and reproductive behavior in birds. Their approach combined the level of mechanistic control achievable in the lab with the fun field ecology trips she was so drawn to years ago in Ecuador. She was also captivated by the lab’s culture of intellectual freedom and cultivation of individual scholarship, where graduate students and postdocs designed and carried out their own projects from the ground up. A formative moment for Stephanie occurred when Elizabeth told her, “This is your training—you’re in charge.” That affirmation encouraged Stephanie to look inward, take ownership of her trajectory, and develop self-reliance. Looking back, she has now taken away a deeper lesson from Elizabeth: to mentor in this way takes immense trust in your trainees, respect for the messy process of science, and strong collaborations to fill in your gaps in expertise. The autonomy Stephanie gained in graduate school was both terrifying and exhilarating, giving her the space to confront a question that many early-stage scientists never have the liberty to ask: What do I actually want to know?
Stephanie zeroed in on her research interests after attending a seminar on Seychelles warblers, where she learned that females could bias the sex of their offspring based on territory quality, a finding that challenged her assumption that sex determination was strictly Mendelian. How could females do that? This question launched Stephanie into her PhD work, which investigated whether the ovarian steroid hormone progesterone could bias offspring sex outcomes. In chickens, she found that elevated progesterone levels skew sex ratios toward females, with high doses yielding up to 75% female offspring. To understand what might drive such hormonal shifts, she turned to Japanese quail, using mating trials to identify behavioral and physiological cues linked to sex outcomes. Her results revealed that female body condition—a measure of how well-nourished the female is relative to her skeletal size—was a key predictor of circulating progesterone levels at the time of embryonic sex determination. By the end of her PhD, Stephanie was deeply curious about the molecular mechanisms linking hormones, sex differentiation, and reproductive physiology—but the tools used today to dissect these mechanisms, such as CRISPR, weren’t yet available in birds. Seeking greater experimental control, she pivoted to mice for her postdoctoral studies to pursue her questions with sharper mechanistic precision.
Wanting to be closer to her husband, who was completing his PhD in Boston, Stephanie joined Dr. Kenn Albrecht’s lab at Boston University Medical Center for her first postdoc, where she investigated the testis determination pathway. Stephanie explored how genes regulating the expression of SRY—a transcription factor on the Y chromosome—influence testis differentiation. This research deepened her molecular training and provided evidence for the hypothesis that ovarian and testicular development pathways are mutually antagonistic.
After this experience, Stephanie reflected on how to align her scientific curiosity with questions that also held translational relevance. That clarity led her to a second postdoc with Dr. Holly Ingraham at UCSF, where she could explore hormones, sex differences, and the neural control of physiology in ways that connected to metabolism and health. She began parallel projects on gonads and the brain, but ultimately pursued a project based on a compelling discovery by a master’s student: female mice that lacked a specific developmental transcription factor in the ventromedial hypothalamus (VMH) exhibited reduced physical activity, resulting in a 30% increase in body mass. Stephanie combined metabolic profiling, RNA microarrays, and targeted manipulations to pinpoint a specific population of VMH neurons that regulated movement without affecting other behaviors. These neurons proved to be both functionally specialized and hormonally responsive, and were later identified to be direct targets of regulation by estrogen. This postdoc experience was a crash course in new techniques, but it underscored Stephanie’s adaptability, perseverance, and love of discovery—captured best in the moment she and Holly celebrated after a long-awaited experiment finally worked. “It was the nerdiest, most joyful thing—just a couple of grown women high-fiving in the lab.”
In 2016, Stephanie launched her lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology—an exciting but daunting step. Accustomed to team science and close mentorship, she worried about navigating the independence of PI life. What drew her to UCLA was the sense of community: colleagues who shared ideas, offered advice, and genuinely cared about each other's science. Though she was the only one focused on metabolism among a group of hormone experts, she found intellectual synergy with her new colleagues and students eager to join her lab.
The Correa lab’s research centers on how estrogen signaling influences metabolic physiology—specifically, how it regulates temperature, food intake, and energy expenditure to prepare the body for reproduction. These questions kept Stephanie’s research in the brain, where ancient regions like the preoptic area integrate peripheral and central cues to shape behavior. One of her lab’s most surprising discoveries came from studying estrogen-sensitive neurons in the preoptic area. Her postdoc observed that activating these neurons caused mice to enter a torpor-like state—becoming cold to the touch, with significantly reduced movement. Collaborating with experts in hibernation and cardiology, Stephanie and her team confirmed this phenomenon was indeed a physiological torpor-like state. This project marked a scientific leap—and the start of a new line of inquiry into how brain circuits orchestrate adaptive metabolic shifts.
The complexity of brain circuits that once felt intimidating has now become a scientific home for Stephanie. But for her, the most rewarding part of being a PI isn’t just the science. “It’s the training. It’s training talented enthusiastic scientists, and them going off and doing something amazing,” she reflects. Much like her doctoral advisor, Stephanie believes the strongest science comes from students developing their own ideas and honing their individual scientific perspectives. She values the diversity of thought that each trainee brings to the lab, and teaches her students to engage in collaborative science as their questions branch outside of the lab’s expertise. Thus, trainees from the Correa lab are not only the next generation of neuroendocrinologists, but the kind of creative thinkers who will redefine the field.
Stephanie also remains grounded in her expectations for herself and her team, knowing that everyone has lives outside of the lab. She has learned to prioritize, delegate, and give herself and others permission to not be perfect. Ever the scientist, when decompressing at home over some reality television, Stephanie can’t help but study the little nuances of human behavior and psychology. Similarly, Stephanie and her husband collaborate on raising their twin girls with the same care and respect they bring to their scientific collaborations.
What began as wonder at the mating rituals of birds in the Ecuadorian mountains became a lifelong pursuit to understand the science of complex and ancient systems that ultimately influence species fitness and survival. Sitting at the intersection of metabolism, behavior, and hormonal regulation, Stephanie has built a rigorous research program defined by its collaborative spirit and value for diverse ideas. Along her journey, Stephanie has become not only a scientist who rigorously and creatively tackles these fundamental questions, but also a mentor who empowers her trainees to do the same.
Find out more about Stephanie and her lab’s research here.
Listen to Meenakshi’s full interview with Stephanie on Jan 31, 2025 below!
