About

Darlene D. Francis is an Associate Professor of Public Health and Neuroscience at UC Berkeley. Her research program explores how biological, psychological, and social processes interact over a lifetime to influence health and vulnerability to disease. Her laboratory investigates how these processes are causally related, challenging the historic belief that information only flows in one direction from the genome. Her work demonstrates that genetically identical organisms can manifest dramatically different phenotypic profiles in response to different environmental and social conditions. The research focuses on exploring how social inequalities in health develop, with an emphasis on identifying opportunities for intervention. Her transdisciplinary research spans many disciplines, from molecular epigenetics to social epidemiology, and explores how experience and social factors are transduced into biology.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Internal medicine
• Endocrinology
• Neuroscience
• Biology

Selected publications

• Maternal Deprivation☆

  Elsevier eBooks · 2016-11-21 · 7 citations

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The influence of early maternal care on perceptual attentional set shifting and stress reactivity in adult rats

  Developmental Psychobiology · 2015-08-20 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Stress influences a wide variety of outcomes including cognitive processing. In the rat, early life maternal care can influence developing offspring to affect both stress reactivity and cognitive processes in adulthood. The current study assessed if variations in early life maternal care can influence cognitive performance on a task, the ability to switch cognitive sets, dependent on the medial prefrontal cortex. Early in life, offspring was reared under High or Low maternal Licking conditions. As adults, they were trained daily and then tested on an attentional set-shifting task (ASST), which targets cognitive flexibility in rodents. Stress-sensitive behavioral and neural markers were assayed before and after the ASST. High and Low Licking offspring performed equally well on the ASST despite initial, but not later, differences in stress axis functioning. These results suggest that early life maternal care does not impact the accuracy of attentional set-shifting in rats. These findings may be of particular importance for those interested in the relationship between early life experience and adult cognitive function.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Socioeconomic Status and Social Support

  Psychological Science · 2015-09-02 · 43 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Low socioeconomic status (SES) during childhood confers risk for adverse health in adulthood. Accumulating evidence suggests that this may be due, in part, to the association between lower childhood SES and higher levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines. Drawing from literature showing that low childhood SES predicts exaggerated physiological reactivity to stressors and that lower SES is associated with a more communal, socially attuned orientation, we hypothesized that inflammatory reactivity would be more greatly affected by cues of social support among individuals whose childhood SES was low than among those whose childhood SES was high. In two studies, we found that individuals with lower subjective childhood SES exhibited greater reductions in pro-inflammatory cytokine reactivity to a stressor in the presence of a supportive figure (relative to conditions with an unsupportive or neutral figure). These effects were independent of current SES. This work helps illuminate SES-based differences in inflammatory reactivity to stressors, particularly among individuals whose childhood SES was low.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Natural variation in maternal care and cross-tissue patterns of oxytocin receptor gene methylation in rats

  Hormones and Behavior · 2015-06-30 · 80 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The role of interpersonal processes in shaping inflammatory responses to social-evaluative threat

  Biological Psychology · 2015-07-28 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In response to social-evaluative threat induced in the laboratory, lower (compared to higher) subjective social class of a participant predicts greater increases in the inflammatory cytokine interleukin-6 (IL-6). In spite of the interpersonal nature of social-evaluation, little work has explored whether characteristics of the evaluator shape physiological responses in this context. In the current study, in a sample of 190 college students (male=66), we explored whether one's subjective social class interacts with the perceived social class of an evaluator to predict changes in Oral Mucosal Transudate (OMT) IL-6 in response to the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST). Participants were randomly assigned to be the speaker or the evaluator. Extending past work, we found that while speakers low in subjective social class consistently respond with strong increases in IL-6 regardless of their perception of their evaluator's social class, speakers high in subjective social class responded with greater increases in IL-6 when their evaluator was perceived as high social class compared to when they were perceived as low social class. This finding highlights the importance of perceptions of the evaluator in informing inflammatory responses to a social-evaluative task.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Early life socioeconomic status and social support interact to predict inflammatory responses to a stressor

  PsycEXTRA Dataset · 2014-01-01

  datasetSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Stress and glucocorticoids promote oligodendrogenesis in the adult hippocampus

  Molecular Psychiatry · 2014-02-11 · 220 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Influence of housing variables on the development of stress-sensitive behaviors in the rat

  Physiology & Behavior · 2013-08-01 · 24 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Diverse environments early in mammalian life can have profound influences on the physiology and behavior of developing offspring. Environmental factors can influence offspring development directly or through perturbations in parental care. In the current study, we wished to determine if the influence of a single environmental variable, type of bedding material used in laboratory cages, is capable of altering physiological and behavioral outcomes in offspring. Female rats were housed in cages containing wood pulp or corncob bedding and allowed to mature. These rats, while housed on assigned bedding material, were bred and allowed to give birth. At weaning, male offspring were housed on one of the two bedding conditions and tested later in adulthood on stress-sensitive behavioral measures. Postmortem analysis of glucocorticoid receptor expression and CRH mRNA levels were also measured. Maternal care directed at the pups reared in the two different bedding conditions was also recorded. Rats reared from birth on corncob bedding exhibited decreased anxiety-like behavior, as adults, in both open field and light-dark box tasks compared to wood pulp reared animals. Animals that received similar overall levels of maternal care, regardless of bedding condition, also differed in anxiety-like behaviors as adults, indicating that the bedding condition is capable of altering phenotype independent of maternal care. Despite observed behavioral differences in adult offspring reared in different bedding conditions, no changes in glucocorticoid receptor expression at the level of the hippocampus, frontal cortex, or corticotrophin releasing hormone (CRH) mRNA expression in the hypothalamus were observed between groups. These results highlight the importance of early life housing variables in programming stress-sensitive behaviors in adult offspring.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Novel partial 5<scp>HT</scp>3 agonist pumosetrag reduces acid reflux events in uninvestigated <scp>GERD</scp> patients after a standard refluxogenic meal: a randomized, double‐blind, placebo‐controlled pharmacodynamic study

  Neurogastroenterology & Motility · 2013-09-03 · 6 citations

  article

  BACKGROUND: Low basal lower esophageal sphincter (LES) pressure and transient LES relaxations are major causes of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). Pumosetrag, a novel selective partial 5HT3 receptor agonist, showed a promising effect on reducing reflux events in health. We aimed to evaluate the effect of pumosetrag on changes in reflux episodes, lower esophageal sphincter pressure (LESP), and specific symptoms in patients with GERD receiving a refluxogenic meal. METHODS: Patients with GERD, who developed heartburn and/or regurgitation after ingestion of a refluxogenic meal, were randomized to 1 of 3 dose levels of pumosetrag (0.2, 0.5, or 0.8 mg) or placebo. Before and after 7 days of treatment, patients underwent manometry, intraesophageal multichannel, intraluminal impedance and pH after a standard refluxogenic meal. KEY RESULTS: A total of 223 patients with GERD [125 (56%) women, mean (SD) age = 36 (12) years] were enrolled. No overall treatment effects were detected for the total number of reflux episodes (acidic and weakly acidic) (p > 0.5); however, significant treatment effects (p < 0.05) on the number of acid reflux episodes were observed with lower values on pumosetrag 0.2 mg (10.8 ± 1.1), 0.5 mg (9.5 ± 1.1), and 0.8 mg (9.9 ± 1.1) compared with placebo (13.3 ± 1.1). Significant treatment effects (p < 0.05) were also observed for the percentage of time pH was <4, with less time for pumosetrag at 0.5 mg (10%) and 0.8 mg (10%) compared with placebo (16%). CONCLUSIONS & INFERENCES: In GERD, the partial 5HT3 agonist pumosetrag significantly reduced the rate of acid reflux events but did not result in a significant change in LESP or symptomatic improvement over a 1-week treatment period.

  PublisherDOI

• Performance and Inflammation Outcomes are Predicted by Different Facets of SES Under Stereotype Threat

  Social Psychological and Personality Science · 2013-07-10 · 43 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We experimentally tested whether negative stereotypes linked to lower socioeconomic status (SES), in addition to impairing academic performance (Croizet &amp; Claire, 1998), instigate inflammation processes that are implicated in numerous disease processes. In Study 1, verbal test performance and activation of inflammation processes (measured by levels of an inflammatory protein, Interleukin-6 [IL-6]) varied as a function of SES and test framing (i.e., diagnostic vs. nondiagnostic of intellectual ability), with low SES students underperforming and exhibiting greater IL-6 production in the “diagnostic” condition. In Study 2, students expected their verbal exam performance to be compared to peers of higher or lower SES. Low SES students in the upward comparison condition displayed the greatest inflammatory response and worst test performance. Across both studies, different facets of SES predicted vulnerability to negative outcomes, such that low early life SES predicted heightened inflammation responses, while low current SES predicted impaired academic performance.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R24MH081797

  NIH · $5.7M · 2011

Frequent coauthors

• Michael J. Meaney

  McGill University

  84 shared

• Josie Diorio

  McGill University

  57 shared

• Shakti Sharma

  43 shared

• Christian Caldji

  Douglas Mental Health University Institute

  43 shared

• Paul M. Plotsky

  Emory University

  40 shared

• Patricia LaPlante

  29 shared

• Jonathan R. Seckl

  University of Edinburgh

  27 shared

• Judith Widdowson

  Western General Hospital

  24 shared