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Baldwin Lab

Research Description

I am interested in the effects of environmental stress on animal and human physiology and in ways of reducing the deleterious effects of stress. I am especially interested in the validity of animal models in research, especially use of rodents, including transgenic and knock-out mice. Rodents are extremely sensitive to the environment in institutional animal facilities, and factors such as noise, ultrasound, cage size and cage enrichment (or lack of) significantly affects animal physiology, and hence experimental data. In my research I am investigating the effects of these environmental factors on cardiovascular function (heart rate, blood pressure, heart rate variability) using radiotelemetry, responses of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis (automated blood sampling technique for continuous measurement of corticosterone), microvascular permeability (intravascular injection of fluorescent tracers and intravital microscopy) and intestinal epithelial and microvascular integrity (electron microscopy and immunohistochemistry). A major goal of this work is to obtain data for improving the design of animal facilities and animal care procedures in order to provide valid and robust animal models for research.

Current questions:

How much do routine noise generating procedures common in animal facilities affect experimental data obtained from those animals?

How many apparent differences between knock-out and wild-type mice are real, and how many are only expressed in times of stress (i.e. “normal” housing in animal facilities)?

A second goal is to determine the cellular mechanisms mediating the effects of environmental stress on the autonomic nervous system and the HPA-axis.

A third goal is to investigate the efficacy of energy healing in reducing the effects of stress in rodents, monkeys and humans. Energy healing is based upon the belief that changes in the "life force" of the body, including electromagnetic fields, affect human health and can promote healing. I am most familiar the form of energy healing called Reiki, which is used in some hospitals in the USA, to reduce pain and to speed up the healing process. Two additional techniques that I use for Reikii experiments are measurements of peripheral blood flow (laser Doppler perfusion imager) and measurements of the skin conductance response