Stefanos Stagkourakis

My academic path began with a focus on molecular biology, followed by training in pharmacology at Oxford and neuroscience at Uppsala University and Karolinska Institute (KI). During my PhD at KI, I explored neuromodulation, ion channel dynamics, and the hypothalamic basis of innate behaviors like aggression and parental care.

Between 2019 and 2024, I pursued postdoctoral studies in the lab of David J. Anderson at Caltech, where I led projects identifying memory mechanisms in instinctive behaviors and developed new tools for large-scale single-neuron activity recordings in freely moving animals.

In the fall of 2024, I started my research group through a joint Assistant Professor appointment at Karolinska Institute and SciLifeLab. My lab investigates the brain-wide dynamics and hormonal regulation of survival behaviors, including aggression, fear, and hunger. We combine state-of-the-art neurotechnologies including Neuropixels, 2P imaging, optogenetics, and custom behavioral paradigms to understand how internal states and external stimuli interact in the hypothalamus and connected structures.

Selected Awards

Wallenberg Academy Fellow, Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (2024)

SciLifeLab Fellow - Assistant Professor in Molecular Life Sciece (2024)

Vetenskapsrådet Starting Grant (2024)

NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award, USA (2023)

Our lab explores how instinctive behaviors emerge from the interplay between neural circuits and internal physiological states. We focus on survival-related behaviors such as aggression, fear, and parental care, and ask how their expression is shaped by prior experience, hormonal context, and distributed circuit dynamics. To do so, we combine multi-area neural recordings using Neuropixels and holographic 2P imaging, targeted optogenetics, and behavioral models in freely moving mice.

The lab is an interdisciplinary environment and home to engineers, biologists and computational scientists and together we aim to incorporate methods, build new ones, and generate models of how distributed neural networks regulate physiological and maladaptive behavioral output. A central question we pursue is how specific neuronal ensembles contribute to transitions between internal states, for example, from hunger to satiety, or calm to threat. By characterizing these dynamics, we aim to illuminate mechanisms whose dysregulation may underlie neuropsychiatric conditions like anxiety and impulsive aggression.

I have contributed to teaching and mentorship at both undergraduate and graduate levels across institutions in Europe and the U.S. At the Karolinska Institute, I have been involved in the PhD level course on behavioral analysis, as well as oral examinations and lab supervision in neuroscience and cell biology. I have supervised seven MSc and six undergraduate thesis projects, focusing on data analysis, electrophysiology, optogenetics, and behavioral neuroscience.
During my postdoctoral training at Caltech, I organized and taught the course Bi23, a hands-on module focused on analyzing high-dimensional time series data from neural recordings and behavior. The course emphasized dimensionality reduction, unsupervised learning, and clustering approaches tailored to neuroscience data. Course materials and tutorials can be found here.