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I completed my undergraduate degree in Exercise Science at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, where my first research project examined how music influences the perceived difficulty of exercise. After graduation, I founded and operated a fitness facility in Green Bay before beginning graduate training at the Medical College of Wisconsin. There, I earned my PhD in Physiology with Dr. Hubert Forster, studying how chronic exposure to elevated CO₂ alters the neural and integrative control of breathing in a large-animal (goat) model.

I completed my postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Integrative Brain Research at Seattle Children’s Hospital with Dr. Jan-Marino (Nino) Ramirez. There I focused on brainstem rhythm-generating circuits and how opioids destabilize the networks required to sustain breathing. In parallel, our work identified peripheral mechanisms of fentanyl-induced muscle rigidity and airway collapse, broadening the scope of how opioids impair ventilation and pointing toward new therapeutic strategies.

In our lab, we combine single-cell electrophysiology, high-density population recordings, ventilatory and cardiovascular physiology, and engineered assays to investigate how the brainstem processes sensory afferent information and coordinates cardiorespiratory motor output. Our goal is to identify how physiological disturbances, such as opioids, destabilize this system and to translate these insights into strategies that restore breathing and autonomic stability.

Marissa earned her B.A. from Concordia College Moorhead in 2018 and completed her Ph.D. in Biological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame in 2023. In the Burgraff Lab, she combines physiology, neural recordings, and histology to investigate how opioids disrupt normal encoding of afferent information in the nucleus of the solitary tract (NTS) during breathing. Outside the lab, Marissa enjoys exploring the outdoors with her dog, cozy evenings with her cat by the fire, and getting lost in a good book.

Graduate student