Erica Holiday

Holiday is the Lead Principal Investigator at CYAAR and Assistant Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychological Science, Kennesaw State University. She grew up in Fredericksburg, VA before matriculating into George Mason University in Fairfax, VA where she earned both her BS in Psychology and MA in Biopsychology. Her undergraduate and master's work investigated the influence of social interactions during adolescence on behavioral responses to nicotine in adulthood. During this time Dr. Holiday also interned at the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) in the grants management office where she gained experience in the administrative side of research. She continued her pursuit of unraveling the detrimental effects of adolescent nicotine on brain function, earning her doctorate in Psychology and Neuroscience from Temple University in Philadelphia, PA in 2015. Dr. Holiday worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston, TX where she studied the role of the serotonin system in models of drug relapse using RNA interference technology to delete serotonin receptors to establish their causative role in drug-related relapse. She is the recipient of the Civic Foundation’s Weinstein Summer Graduate Fellowship, a T32 training fellowship at UTMB, and the NIDA Director’s Travel Award. She received the Community Leader Service Award for developing and implementing educational outreach on the neurobiology of substance abuse for the youth community in Southeast, TX. In her spare time, she is an avid gardener, casual gamer, and aspiring poet. Her previous research focuses on working memory and cognition will provide the foundation for new research projects along the continuum of care including prevention, intervention, and recovery. Disordered cognitive processes are known to be both a risk factor for initiating substance use and a consequence of substance use. Her doctoral work established that psychostimulant (i.e. nicotine and caffeine) use during adolescence caused learning deficits that manifested during adulthood. She was fortunate to collaborate with researchers at the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to further dive into the role of altered gene expression underlying some of these learning deficits and my future goals involve investigating genetic variations in recovery processes to begin incorporating working memory training during recovery.