Psychology Thesis Award Recognizes Postpartum Depression Research

Kerry Buckhaults '23 MS (right) receives the Ingeborg L. and O. Byron Ward Outstanding Thesis Award from Psychological and Brain Sciences Chair Mike Brown, PhD, (left) and thesis advisor Ben Sachs, PhD.

VILLANOVA, Pa. – The Villanova University Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences is pleased to announce Kerry Buckhaults '23 MS as this year's Ingeborg L. and O. Byron Ward Outstanding Thesis Award winner. This award honors one Psychology master's student each year for a particularly excellent thesis and thesis project. The criteria for nomination and selection of the winner are:

• Quality, creativity and scientific merit of the thesis project
• Scope of student contribution to the project
• Quality of the written product
• Quality of the thesis seminar presentation

Buckhaults conducted her thesis project, "Examining Estrogen Withdrawal Following Hormone-Simulated Pregnancy as a Model of Postpartum Depression and Anxiety in C57BL/6 Mice," under the direction of Benjamin Sachs, PhD.

"Kerry was a phenomenal student and graduate assistant. Her thesis was one of the most work-intensive and technically challenging of any student I’ve supervised," said Dr. Sachs. "Her project utilized mouse models to determine whether the hormonal alterations that occur during pregnancy are sufficient to induce behavioral changes consistent with postpartum depression. This type of research has the potential to explain the biological contributions to mental illness during the postpartum period, which might eventually help identify new treatment approaches for vulnerable individuals. Her study required her to learn surgical and drug-administration techniques that could simulate the hormone fluctuations that occur throughout pregnancy and after childbirth. Following these 'hormone-simulated pregnancies,' she looked for changes in behavior using several behavioral tests. Kerry’s results suggest that exposure to pregnancy-like hormone levels can increase anxiety-like behavior in mice, but the sharp decline in hormone levels that occur following childbirth did not appear to induce depression-like behavior. Her work, along with some molecular analyses performed by a subsequent graduate student in the lab, Ben Swack, was published in Physiology & Behavior last year. 

Buckhaults is a first-year PhD student in Neuroscience at Thomas Jefferson University.