Education Background

Doctorate of Philosophy, Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology
Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, 1996

Master of Science, Genetics, Environmental Science & Policy
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, WI, 1992

Bachelor of Science, Biology
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, WI, 1990

Contact Information

mtsimonich@orst.edu

Research Interest/Focus

My current research focus is the effect of nicotine on vertebrate development.  Nicotine interacts with some of the same receptors used by the neurotransmitter acetylcholine.  The neural tissue-specific forms of these receptors are highly conserved between humans and zebrafish.  Collaborators and I are using the embryonic zebrafish to model the consequences of nicotine exposure during development.  While a large body of literature already describes the effects of nicotine exposure in adults of many species, developmental nicotine exposure has only recently received attention.  The most insidious aspect of nicotine is that an acute developmental exposure can negatively affect adult cognition and motor skills.   The persistence of nicotine-induced defects led us to hypothesize that permanent neuronal changes occur in response to exposure during development.  In zebrafish embryos we see that nicotine exposure directly alters central nervous system development via the incorrectly timed stimulation of neuronal acetylcholine receptors.  We are now using various behavioral assessments in conjunction with anti-sense morpholino knockdown of specific acetylcholine receptors to determine how developmental nicotine impairs cognition in adults.