GREGORY J. QUIRK, PHD
GREGORY J. QUIRK, PHD
B.A., Northwestern University, 1982
PhD, State University of New York – Brooklyn, 1990
Raised in southern Connecticut, Quirk went to Northwestern University in Evanston Illinois for his undergraduate training. One of the first NU students to major in Neuroscience, he worked in the laboratory of Dr. Aryeh Routtenberg studying dentate granule cells in the hippocampus and memory. He then pursued a PhD in Neural and Behavioral Science at SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn NY, working with Drs. Robert U. Muller (Mentor), John L. Kubie, and James B. Ranck, studying place cells in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex. This was followed by a Fulbright Fellowship to establish the first Neuroscience research laboratory in Honduras at UNAH – Tegucigalpa, focusing on malnutrition and the developing CNS. Following a post-doctoral fellowship at NYU in the laboratory of Dr. Joseph LeDoux, studying cortico-amygdala circuits in acquisition and extinction of conditioned fear, Quirk then returned to Latin America in 1997 to establish his own research laboratory at Ponce School of Medicine (now Ponce Health Sciences University) in Puerto Rico. In 2007, he moved his lab to the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine in San Juan. Over the past 20 years, Quirk’s research program on fear learning has brought competitive research grants, high-profile publications, and first-class training opportunities for undergraduate and doctoral students living in Puerto Rico.