During her doctorate at the University of Mainz, Sarah Ayash developed a behavioral model to differentiate between stress-resilient and stress-susceptible subgroups in a cohort of socially defeated mice, and established an extinction training design for aversive social memories. Subsequently, her postdoc research focused on the underlying neuronal mechanisms and identified unique genetic signatures and brain circuits in the two subgroups. During her funding as an Einstein Independent Researcher at Charité, Ayash’s laboratory will be working with Dietmar Schmitz, Director of the Neuroscience Research Center, to decode the neuronal mechanisms of stress resilience. Her plan is to investigate the role of dopamine, to research possible treatments, and to test the transferability of the results to female mice.