Thomas Degroat Successfully Defends Doctorate

Thomas Degroat, Ph.D. (Roepke lab, May 2025), successfully defended his doctorate, with his seminar titled, “How Chronic Physical and Social Stress Can Affect Behavior and Neurophysiology of the BNST,” in a hybrid format on January 24, 2025. His research studied how chronic stress leads to depressive-like avoidant behaviors in mice that is related to changes in the neurophysiology of the anterodorsal bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (adBNST). While in the graduate program, Tommy was supported in part by a White-Stevens Graduate Fellowship and a Hilda S. Foster Fellowship. Since he started at Rutgers in fall 2019, he had served as vice president, co-president, or president of the EAB Graduate Student Organization and received the Graduate Student Association (GSA) Excellence in Graduate Leadership Award in Fall 2023. Tommy will return to his home state of Michigan to be a postdoctoral fellow at Wayne State University.