Chronic stress contributes to the onset and severity of a number of psychiatric disorders, including major depressive disorder (MDD), which has become the leading cause of disability worldwide. It has remained unknown for some time how different individuals can go through a similar stressor where some individuals are unaltered or even strengthened by the experience and others demonstrate a depressive response. In order to address this question, a mouse model of depression has been developed where behavior is measure in response to a chronic social stress (chronic social defeat stress, cSDS). In this model, roughly half of the animals demonstrate a resilient-like phenotype and half demonstrate a susceptible phenotype. Recently, we identified a predictive brain network signature in the cSDS model whereby we could reliably predict prior to a chronic stressor which mice would have a depressive (i.e. susceptible) response to the stress. A major limitation to this study, however, was that it was conducted using only male mice. Given that females in the population get MDD at nearly twice the rate of males, it is critically important to conduct similar studies in female mice. The goal of this project will be to pilot chronic social defeat stress in female mice in order to probe the unique functional connectivity conferring resilience or susceptibility to chronic stress in female mice.