Constantina Theofanopoulou is the Herbert and Neil Singer Research Assistant Professor at Rockefeller University, Visiting Scholar at New York University, and Research Associate at Emory University and the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs. She is the Director of the Neurobiology of Social Communication team. Her research aim is to understand the neural circuits of complex sensory-motor behaviors that serve social communication, specifically, speech and dance, and to identify possible therapies for speech and motor disorders.
For her Ph.D. (Universal Ph.D. title: University of Barcelona, Duke University, and Rockefeller University), she worked on the social reward mechanisms of vocal learning, studying the role of oxytocin in vocal learning in songbirds and in human evolution of sociality, in general. These projects led her to realize that the evolution of the oxytocin/vasotocin gene family was largely misunderstood, an issue that percolated down to an inconsistent gene nomenclature. Using computational genomic tools, she shed light on the evolutionary history of these genes and proposed a universal gene nomenclature. This work laid the foundations for her current clinical project on testing the therapeutic role of oxytocin in speech deficits.
