Rate My Professor Catherine Marcinkiewcz

Catherine Marcinkiewcz, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neuroscience and Pharmacology at the University of Iowa. She earned her B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University and her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2015. She completed postdoctoral training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Florida. In April 2018, she joined the faculty in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Iowa to establish the Marcinkiewcz Lab.

Dr. Marcinkiewcz's research focuses on the role of serotonergic circuits originating from the raphe nuclei in alcohol dependence, mood disorders, and neurodegenerative diseases. Her lab examines the effects of stress, alcohol consumption, and antidepressants on the brain, including how adolescent ethanol drinking promotes neuroinflammation, serotonin dysregulation, depression, and chronic pain, as well as connections between alcohol use and tau accumulation in Alzheimer's disease. She has secured major funding, including a five-year $1.9 million R01 grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in 2020 and support from the Iowa Neuroscience Institute for the SMASH project on serotonin in Alzheimer's disease and Lewy Body Dementia. Key publications include 'Alcohol inhibits sociability via serotonin inputs to the nucleus accumbens' (Nature Communications, 2023), 'Human tau-overexpressing mice recapitulate brainstem serotonergic deficits in Alzheimer's disease' (Acta Neuropathologica Communications, 2023), 'Adolescent ethanol drinking promotes hyperalgesia independently of adolescent-typical ethanol withdrawal' (Alcohol: Clinical and Experimental Research, 2022), and 'A New Insight into the Role of CART Peptide in Serotonergic Circuits' (Synapse, 2025). Honors include the Williams-Cannon Faculty Fellowship (2021), Associate Membership in the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (2019), and a Young Investigator Award from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (2019). She mentors graduate students and postdocs in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Neuroscience.