Kyle Frantz, Ph.D.

Kyle Frantz was born and raised in central Pennsylvania, attended State College Area High School, and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. At Penn, she migrated quickly from architecture to psychology, fascinated by the fact that chemicals (drugs) can change human characteristics such as personality (behavior), and she has maintained interest in behavioral pharmacology ever since. As an undergraduate and post-graduate research technician, she worked with Drs. Harvey Grill and Alan Spector on neural circuits involved in feeding and taste. At the University of Florida for graduate school with Dr. Carol Van Hartesveldt, she focused on development of the dopamine system and its role in locomotor behavior. During a year abroad on a Fulbright Fellowship to study with Drs. Urban Ungerstedt and Billy O’Connor at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, she used in vivo microdialysis to study neural communication in the mesocorticolimbic pathway. At The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California for a post-doctoral fellowship with Drs. George Koob and Larry Parsons, she established her current line of research on adolescent vulnerability to drugs of abuse, using the rat model of intravenous drug self-administration. Her research at Scripps was funded by an individual National Research Service Award. During her tenure in California, she also developed her strong interest in science education, teaching at the University of California, San Diego, and working with The Salk Institute BioBus. Joining the faculty in the Department of Biology at Georgia State University in 2002, and the Neuroscience Institute when it launched in 2009, Dr. Frantz has maintained two lines of scholarly activity: one in laboratory research on the developmental neurobiology of reward and reinforcement, and the second in science education administration and research. Her laboratory research explores the role of the gut microbiome in vulnerability to drug reward and reinforcement (led by PhD candidate, Greg Suess, in collaboration with Benoit Chassaing), as well as sex differences in social reward (in collaboration with Elliott Albers). In science education, Dr. Frantz maintains federal, private, and internal funding for summer and academic year research programs for high school students, teachers, and undergraduates, including IMSD and MARC funded by NIH, the CASA-Sloan Scholars Program funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Humanities Inclusivity Program (HIP) funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She is also Director of Science Education for the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience, overseeing The Neuroscience School with high school short-courses and middle school brain camps. And she serves on the Board of Directors for the Winter Conference on Brain Research. For Georgia State University, Dr. Frantz is Director of the Center for the Advancement of Students and Alumni into Graduate and Professional Programs (CASA), an institutional hub supporting the progression of students from all backgrounds to and through advanced degree programs, with emphasis on MD, JD, and PhD degrees.