Yong Sang Jo
Papers
2
Total Citations
15
H-Index
2
About
Yong Sang Jo is a behavioral neuroscientist whose research investigates the neural mechanisms of defensive behaviors, with a particular focus on sex differences and naturalistic threat processing. Her work bridges the gap between traditional fear conditioning paradigms and ethologically relevant threat scenarios, revealing how internal states like the estrous cycle modulate defensive responses. In her influential 2023 study, Jo demonstrated that conditioned flight responses in female rats are estrous-cycle dependent, challenging the field’s overreliance on freezing behavior as the sole measure of fear. Her 2025 paper further advanced this line of inquiry by showing that calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) neurons in the parabrachial nucleus act as a general alarm system, modulating both passive and active defensive behaviors. This work has significant implications for understanding sex-specific vulnerabilities to anxiety and trauma-related disorders. With her papers already garnering early citations, Jo is establishing herself as a leading voice in the next generation of fear neuroscience, pushing the field toward more inclusive and ecologically valid models of threat processing.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
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- 2