PhD Candidate Lara Taniguchi Envisions a New Era of Mental Health Treatment

It all started at a public pool in Japan.

When a young teen born and raised in Osaka spotted a flyer recruiting volunteers to help children with disabilities learn to swim, it set in motion a journey that would put Lara Taniguchi on a mission to better understand how our brains work.

Now a PhD candidate at the UC Irvine School of Medicine, Taniguchi is on the verge of defending a dissertation centered on the question of why males and females respond differently to early-life stress.

“Early-life stress is a major risk factor for developing mental illness later in life, but mental health disorders look very different depending on sex,” says Taniguchi. “My research tries to understand what is happening in the brain to drive that difference.”

From the Pool to the Lab

For four years, Taniguchi served as a volunteer swim instructor. “Many of the swimmers were on the autism spectrum,” she says. “Working with these children, I grew fascinated by autism and the brain. I genuinely wanted to understand what they were experiencing so I could better support them.”

When that curiosity prompted Taniguchi to search Google for “college majors related to the brain,” it marked the first step of her newly cemented career path.

“The search result was my introduction to neuroscience,” she says. Taniguchi went on to earn a degree in molecular and cell biology from UC Berkeley, with an emphasis in neurobiology.

“Growing up in Japan also shaped my neuroscience journey,” she says. “People there rarely discuss mental health openly, and I watched people I cared about struggle in silence.”

In college, Taniguchi experienced her own mental health struggles, and it took time for her to recognize the problem and voice her concerns.

“I spent hours at the gym every day, restricted my eating and felt intense guilt and shame whenever I lost control of those restrictions,” she explains. When she was eventually diagnosed with atypical anorexia, she called it “strangely validating.” She finally had the language to grapple with what she was experiencing.

“I wanted to understand what was happening in my own mind and body,” says Taniguchi, “and I became deeply curious about the neural circuits behind disordered eating.”

This also helped her understand how people from marginalized communities can struggle to secure diagnosis and treatment — and she now works to advocate for those communities.

Connecting Neuroscience to Health Outcomes

After graduating from UC Berkeley, Taniguchi worked as a research assistant at Stanford University before entering the Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program at UC Irvine in 2021. The following year, she joined the lab of Tallie Z. Baram, MD, PhD, where researchers explore how early-life experiences influence developing brain circuits and how underlying plasticity mechanisms promote health or disease.

“What I have loved most about the Baram Lab is the combination of the science and the people,” says Taniguchi. “We have built friendships outside the lab, and I’m grateful to my advisor and others in the lab for giving me space to belong.”

Taniguchi also loves working on questions that “connect basic neuroscience to real-world mental health outcomes.”

Her dissertation focuses on an experimental study demonstrating how males exposed to early stress show reduced motivation for rewards, mirroring patterns that characterize depression, while females exposed to the same stress show heightened reward-seeking behavior, resembling patterns seen in substance use disorders.

“We identified a previously unknown pathway connecting the basolateral amygdala, a region that processes emotional information, to the nucleus accumbens, a region that governs motivation and reward-seeking,” says Taniguchi. The differences come down to wiring — specifically, how the circuit is structurally organized in the brains of males versus females.

“If we can map how early-life adversity rewires these circuits in a sex-specific way,” she says, “we could eventually develop biomarkers to identify vulnerable children earlier and design treatments that target the right circuits for the right individual.”

On the Move & Human-Centered

When Taniguchi isn’t in the lab, you can find her dancing, running, hiking, traveling or trying new food and drinking matcha.

“Dance has been part of my life since I was 4 years old, and I took it seriously for years,” says Taniguchi. When she first came to UC Irvine for grad school, she took a ballet class through the Claire Trevor School of the Arts. She also took commercial dance classes at the Anteater Recreation Center and, for a while, joined a hip-hop dance team.

“Dance gives me permission to stop thinking about everything else and just move,” says Taniguchi, who loves curating the dance playlist for the annual Baram Lab holiday party.

“I also have a fairly serious racing habit,” she says, noting that during grad school she has competed in two marathons and five half marathons — most recently on July 26 in San Francisco. She often runs with a group of fellow neuroscience grad students through a running club they started called the Myelin Milers.

Taniguchi ties the enjoyment she gets from these hobbies in part to overcoming disordered eating. “I exercise now because it makes me feel empowered and focused, not to change how I look,” she says, adding that she facilitates weekly recovery support groups through the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders (ANAD).

“Sitting with people who are navigating the same struggles that I study at the lab reminds me why this work matters,” she says. “It keeps me grounded and connected to the human side of my research.”

Taniguchi also serves as co-chair of the K-12 committee for the UC Irvine Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.

“I help organize hands-on neuroscience education for underserved schools,” she says. “Watching a student light up with questions and excitement is one of the most rewarding experiences I have had in graduate school.”

These experiences have taught Taniguchi that community building is integral to science. “I’ve been fortunate to receive support along my journey, and I want to give back in some way,” she says, “whether that is through research, outreach or making sure people affected by mental illness have a voice in how we approach this work.”

Taniguchi’s long-term goal is to lead a research or therapeutic development program, studying sex-specific mechanisms of psychiatric vulnerability and developing circuit-targeted interventions in close collaboration with psychiatrists and clinicians.

“I hope work like mine,” she says, “contributes to a new era of mental health treatment that is more precise, more inclusive and rooted in a deeper understanding of how diverse brains actually are.”

— Shani Murray