Alejo Acuña is a Ph.D. student in Biology at the Neuroplasticity Unit of the Laboratorio de Neurociencias, University of the Republic, Uruguay.
He began his academic education studying mood disorders in humans using neuroimaging techniques during his M.Sc. After completing his degree, Alejo shifted his focus to animal models to explore the neural mechanisms underlying brain plasticity. On his Ph.D. project he is investigating the potential of Ibogaine, an atypical psychedelic, to facilitate plastic changes in the visual cortex of mice.
Alejo is presently undertaking a five-month internship at Tommaso Pizzorusso’s laboratory at the National Research Council of Italy. His experiments there focus on examining Ibogaine’s effects on key mediators of brain plasticity, specifically perineuronal networks and inhibition, to better understand its role in enhancing neural plasticity.The atypical psychedelic Ibogaine facilitates plastic changes in monocularly deprived mice.