Creating a New Kind of Doctor
We recruit and train physician leaders as comfortable taking on systemic challenges in health as caring for individual patients.
ARE YOU ONE?
Discovery to Impact — Faster
We reward creative thinking and encourage rapid experimentation, using collaborative programs to speed promising research to market.
SEE HOW
Improving Care. Improving Health.
We’re here to make health — including health care — better. The end goal is a complete revolution in how people get and stay healthy.
WHAT IT MEANS
In This Section
More Information
GET CARE
Health in the Landscape of Life
Enabling the healthscape, the ecosystem outside the clinic, requires improving the system to pay for health drivers.
EXPLORE FURTHER
More Information
DEVELOP A PRODUCT
Meet Dell Med
We’re rethinking the role of academic medicine in improving health — and doing so with a unique focus on our community.
ABOUT US
More Information
EXPLORE
Make an Appointment Give Faculty Students Alumni Directory

Jennifer Donegan, Ph.D.

About

Jennifer Donegan, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Dell Medical School. She holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Neuroscience at The University of Texas at Austin and is a member of the Institute for Early Life Adversity Research.

Donegan graduated magna cum laude from Texas Christian University with a B.S. in psychology. She obtained her Ph.D. in neuroscience from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. Prior to joining Dell Med, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Pharmacology at the UT Health Science Center at San Antonio.

Donegan’s research focuses on understanding how stress throughout the lifespan affects neural circuit function. Specifically, her research examines the effect of early life and adult stress on the function of ventral hippocampal circuits known to be involved in schizophrenia. Her lab uses a combination of techniques, including behavioral phenotyping, in vivo extracellular electrophysiology and molecular assays. The ultimate goal of the Donegan laboratory is to understand how neural circuit function is disrupted in schizophrenia so that new therapeutic targets can be identified. Donegan has received numerous awards for her work, including a Schizophrenia International Research Society Travel Award and a BRAIN Initiative Pathway to Independence Award.