Dr. Pennington is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and a member of the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health. His research utilizes innovative approaches to record and manipulate neural circuits in order to define their roles in stress, emotion, and learning.

He received his PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience from UCLA in the laboratory of Michael Fanselow, studying how stress and opioid use influence one another. He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in the laboratory of Denise Cai, where he used novel imaging technologies to advance our understanding of stress vulnerability.

Dr. Pennington’s lab is focused on uncovering how negative emotions are represented by brain circuitry and how these circuits are modified by experience. The long-term goal is to harness these discoveries to develop novel approaches for the treatment of anxiety disorders and other mental health conditions.

The lab utilizes a complementary set of methodologies to address these questions, including recording ongoing neuronal activity in freely behaving animals, manipulating the activity of discrete cell populations to test their function, and tagging cells activated by specific experiences in order to define their identity. These techniques are combined with principles of experimental psychology to connect brain activity with behavior. The lab is also involved in various open-source software and hardware projects to help advance scientific discovery.

For a full list of publications, see Google Scholar:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=yZ1dyEoAAAAJ

Representative Publications:

Pennington ZT, LaBanca AR, Abdel-Raheim SD, Bacon ME, Mahmoud AN, Sompolpong P, Baggetta AM, Zaki Y, Ko B, Dong Z, Smith ACW, Kenny PJ, Cai DJ (2024). An anterior hypothalamic circuit gates stress vulnerability. bioRxiv, 2024.10.28.620614v1. doi: 10.1101/2024.07.03.601770.

Pennington ZT, LaBanca AR, Sompolpong P, Abdel-Raheim SD, Ko B, Christenson Wick Z, Feng Y, Dong Z, Francisco TR, Bacon ME, Chen L, Fulton SL, Maze I, Shuman T, Cai DJ (2024). Dissociable contributions of the amygdala and ventral hippocampus to stress-induced changes in defensive behavior. Cell Reports, 43(11):114871. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2024.114871. PMID: 39427320.

Pennington ZT, Trott JM, Rajbhandari AK, Li K, Walwyn WM, Evans CJ, Fanselow MS (2020). Chronic opioid pretreatment potentiates the sensitization of fear learning by trauma. Neuropsychopharmacology, 45(3): 482-490. doi: 10.1038/s41386-019-0559-5. PMID: 31787748; PMCID: PMC6968993.

Pennington ZT, Dong Z, Feng Y, Vetere LM, Page-Harley L, Shuman T, Cai DJ (2019). ezTrack: An open-source video analysis pipeline for the investigation of animal behavior. Scientific Reports, 9(1): 19979. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-56408-9. PMID: 31882950; PMCID: PMC6934800.

• Freedman Prize for Exceptional Basic Research, Honorable Mention, Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (2025)
• Postdoc Innovator Award, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (2024)
• Pathway to Independence Award, National Institute of Mental Health (2023)
• Young Investigator Award, Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (2023)
• Outstanding Citizen Award, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (2022)

Dr. Pennington is currently accepting graduate students.