Khadijah Shanazz PhD, MBA: Behavioral neuroscientist

My academic interest in the neuroscience started in my undergraduate studies in Psychology at Augusta University where I graduated magna cum laude while investigating pain-related behavior in mice and rats in Dr. Laurence Miller’s lab. I spent a brief year working in a brain-blood vessel lab studying the effects of increased blood pressure on cognitive dysfunction. This foundation led me to my doctoral research on emotional memory and post-traumatic stress in Dr. Almira Vazdarjanova’s lab at AU. Together, Almira and I worked on innovating the Open Field to include multiple anxiogenic factors which we named the Light-Dark Open Field (Shanazz, K., Dixon-Melvin, R., Bunting, K. M., Nalloor, R., & Vazdarjanova, A. I. (2021). Light-Dark Open Field (LDOF): A novel task for sensitive assessment of anxiety. Journal of neuroscience methods, 363). Additionally we found sex differences in fear expression and characterized ‘anxioescapic’ behavior in female rats. Moreover, we found that using a different behavioral measure, avoidance, was commonly effective in both male and female rats and thus were able to compare both sexes despite differences in behavioral expression (Shanazz, K., Dixon-Melvin, R., Nalloor, R., Thumar, R., & Vazdarjanova, A. I. (2022). Sex differences in avoidance extinction after contextual fear conditioning: anxioescapic behavior in female rats. Neuroscience, 497, 146-156). I examined inflammation as a potential susceptibility factor in development of PTSD-like behavior in rats and found that neuroinflammation is likely involved in the etiology of PTSD suggesting that the pathophysiology of PTSD is neurogenic in nature (Shanazz, K., Nalloor, R., Lucas, R., & Vazdarjanova, A. (2023). Neuroinflammation is a susceptibility factor in developing a PTSD-like phenotype. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 17).
My current work as a post-doctoral fellow in Dr. David Blake’s lab at AU uses deep brain stimulation in the basal forebrain of mice to study neuromodulatory outputs at the cortex using two-photon imaging and GRAB sensors (Shanazz, K., Xie, K., Oliver, T., Bogan, J., Vale, F. L., Sword, J., … & Blake, D. T. (2025). Cortical acetylcholine response to deep brain stimulation of the basal forebrain in mice. Journal of Neurophysiology, 133(3), 825-838.). DBS of the basal forebrain has been shown to enhance cognitive function in mice, monkeys, and men. I have taken an important step forward in the scientific rigor of this work and have applied this technique in awake mice. I have also begun examining neurovascular responses in this model with the help of Philip O’Herron PhD, and Sergei Kirov PhD. We have recently begun exploring the neuro vascular responses to acetylcholine with help from Philip O’Herron and Sergei Kirov. I have also worked on EEG and began work examining neuromodulatory outputs of vagal nerve stimulation at the cortex.
Google scholar link to my publications https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=Kz7D928AAAAJ