Ron Gaykema
Ron Gaykema, PhD, was born in the
Netherlands and completed his academic education within the borders of
the small country by the North Sea. He received his Bacherlor of
Science degree in Biology at the University of Groningen in the
northern part of the Netherlands. He had his first experiences with
experimental research working on projects guided by his mentors Drs.
Paul Luiten, Anton Steffens and Anton Scheurink. He also did his
graduate work at the University of Groningen, where he investigated the
organizational features of the cholinergic corticopetal system in the
rat basal forebrain between 1986 and 1992. In 1993, Dr. Gaykema moved
to Charlottesville, VA, to work with Dr. Laszlo Zaborszky at the
University of Virginia (and later at Rutgers University in Newark, NJ)
on the characterization of neural input of basal forebrain cholinergic
neurons with correlated light and electron microscopic microscopy. In
1994, he returned to the Netherlands to work at the Vrije Universiteit
in Amsterdam with Dr. Fred Tilders to characterize neural activation in
response to inflammatory stimuli. Doing so, Gaykema became active
in the "psychoneuroimmunology" research. He continued the study of
neural systems responsive to immune stimuli in the context of sickness
symptoms and anxiety, at the University of Colorado in Boulder (with
Drs. Steven Maier and Linda Watkins) between 1997-2000, and now at the
University of Virginia.
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