Meaghan Creed

Creed grew up in Chatham, Ontario, Canada, on the banks of Lake St. Clair.[1][2] She attended the McNaughton Avenue Public School and became interested in biology as early as grade 2 when a scientist came into her classroom to talk about genetically engineered corn.[1] She completed high school at Chatham-Kent Secondary School.[1] Creed says that her physics, biology, and chemistry teachers helped to motivate her to pursue biology in her undergraduate degree.[1] Creed moved to Toronto in 2004 to conduct undergraduate research at the University of Toronto Scarborough Campus.[1] She graduated in 2008 with an Honours Bachelor of Science.[3] Creed stayed with the University of Toronto for her graduate studies, but moved downtown to conduct research at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health under Jose N. Nobrega.[3] Her graduate studies explored deep brain stimulation (DBS) in treating movement disorders.[3] Creed completed her PhD in pharmacology and neuroscience in 2012.[1]

Creed completed her postdoctoral work at the University of Geneva in the Department of Basic Neuroscience[4] She worked under Christian Lüscher, where she learned techniques such as optogenetics and electrophysiology in models of cocaine addiction.[5] Her postdoctoral work used DBS to reduce synaptic plasticity in the mesolimbic reward circuitry in response to cocaine addiction.[2]

After her postdoctoral work in Switzerland, Creed came back to North America in 2016 as she was recruited to be an Assistant Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.[12] Creed's lab at the University of Maryland focused on probing the neural circuitry underlying reward-seeking, risk tolerance, impulsivity, and anhedonia in order to one day develop strategies to modulate these circuits in a therapeutic manner.[4]

Creed was recruited to Washington University in St. Louis in October 2018, where she now holds the title of Associate Professor of Anesthesiology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience and runs her lab in the Washington University Pain Center.[3] Creed's lab focuses on developing novel neuromodulatory approaches to treat brain related disorders such as depression, chronic pain, and addiction.[13] The types of neuromodulatory therapies her lab focuses on are deep brain stimulation, targeted drug delivery, and neurostimulation.[13]

The first paper published by the Creed Lab in 2018 explored the distinct population of Glutamatergic ventral pallidum (VP) neurons and their role in reward seeking behavior.[14] Creed and her team found that VP neurons have excitatory projections to lateral habenula, rostromedial tegmental nucleus, and GABAergic VTA neurons.[14] They also found that selective activation of this subpopulation of VP glutamatergic neurons induced place avoidance suggesting their role in constraining reward seeking behavior.[14] Continuing to explore the VP, Creed and her team looked at the role of the GABAergic VP neurons in appetitive and aversive behavior.[15] They first explored human imaging studied to look at the role of the VP in the human brain and found that it tracks reward-sensitivity and motivation to seek rewards.[15] They further found that a subsection of the VP seemed to be implicated in processing aversive information.[15] They mimicked these findings in the rodent brain using in vivo electrophysiology and behavioral pharmacology which poses the question as to how the mechanisms by which the VP is able to elicit such distinct behavioral outputs, aversive or appetitive behaviors, when it plays a role in both.[15] Their findings set up the anatomical and molecular background for future studies to probe these questions.

Her lab also is a proponent of Open Science. In 2018, they developed an Open Source lickometer, that allows scientists to easily detect when mice lick for specific substances in self administration and sucrose preference tasks.[16] They made the instructions, the code and the schematics all open source.[16] Further, in 2019, they received funding from the McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience at Washington University, in addition to donations from the WashU Pain Center and Anesthesiology Division of Basic Research to support a series of workshops to introduce people to open source techniques like DeepLabCut, co developed by Mackenzie Mathis and Alexander Mathis, Bonsai, and Arduino.[17]

• 2019 Rita Allen Foundation Scholar Award in Pain[18]
• Daniel X. Freedman Prize, Brain and Behavior Research Foundation - Cellular adaptations underlying learned helplessness behavior[3]
• 2017 Science AAAS-PINS Inaugural Prize In Neuromodulation[4]
• 2016 Prix Pfizer de le Recherch / Pfizer Research Prize for Outstanding Translational Research[19]

• Vachez YM*, Tooley JR*, Abiraman K, Matikainen-Ankney BA, Casey E, Earnest T, Ramos LM, Silberberg H, Godynyuk E, Uddin O, Marconi L, Le Pichon CE, Creed MC. Ventral arkypallidal neurons inhibit accumbal firing to promote reward consumption. Nat Neurosci. 2021 24:379–390.[20]
• Fobbs WC, Bariselli S, Licholai JA, Miyazaki NL, Matikainen-Ankney BA, Creed MC, Kravitz AV. Continuous representations of speed by striatal medium spiny neurons. J Neurosci. 2020 Feb 19;40(8):1679-1688.[21]
• Godynyuk E, Bluitt MN, Tooley JR, Kravitz AV, Creed MC. An open-source, automated, home-cage sipper device for monitoring liquid ingestive behavior in rodents. eNeuro. 2019. 10;6(5).[22]
• Tooley J, Marconi L, Alipio JB, Matikainen-Ankney B, Georgiou P, Kravitz AV, Creed M. Glutamatergic ventral pallidal neurons modulate activity of the habenula - tegmental circuitry and constrain reward seeking. Biological Psychiatry.  2018.[14]
• Creed MC. Current and emerging neuromodulation therapies for addiction: insight from pre-clinical studies. Current Opinion in Neurobiology.  2018.[23]
• Creed M, Pascoli VP, Lüscher C. Refining deep brain stimulation to emulate optogenetic treatment of synaptic pathology. Science. 2015. 347(6222):659-64.
• Creed M, Ntamati R, Chandra R, Lobo MK, Lüshcer C.  Convergence of rewarding and anhedonic effects of cocaine in the ventral pallidum. Neuron. 2016.  92(1): 214–226.[11]
• Lee D*, Creed M*, Jung K*, Wendler DJ, Oh WC, Mignocchi NL, Lüscher C, and Kwon HB. Temporally precise labeling and control of neuromodulatory circuits in the mammalian brain. Nature Methods.  2017.  14(5):495-503.[24]
• Creed MC, Hamani C, Nobrega JN. Effects of repeated deep brain stimulation on depressive- and anxiety-like behavior in rats: comparing entopeduncular and subthalamic nuclei. Brain Stimulation. 2012. 6(4):506-14.[25]
• Creed MC, Hamani C, Bridgeman A, Fletcher PJ, Nobrega JN. Contribution of decreased serotonin release to the antidyskinetic effects of deep brain stimulation in a rodent model of tardive dyskinesia: comparison of the subthalamic and entopeduncular nuclei. Journal of Neuroscience.  2012. 32(28)9874-81.[26]
• Creed MC, Hamani C, Nobrega JN. Early gene mapping after deep brain stimulation in a rat model of tardive dyskinesia: comparison with transient local inactivation.  European Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology. 2011. 22(7):506-517.[27]