Neurobiology of Sickness and Social Behavior
- Speaker
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Catherine Dulac, Ph.D.Samuel W. Morris University Professor, Harvard University
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
The 2024 lecture series in neuroscience and autism science is “The Social Brain.” Social interactions dominate our world and experiences. Human society itself results from large-scale social behavior. Such behaviors are also ubiquitous in other animals, from cooperation in nonhuman primates to the courtship rituals of flies. In these lectures, scientists will discuss how these social behaviors likely arise through neurobiological mechanisms shared across species.
2024 Lecture Series Themes
Mathematics and Computer Science: Machine Learning in the Natural Sciences
Presidential Lectures are free public colloquia centered on four main themes: Biology, Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science, and Neuroscience and Autism Science. These curated, high-level scientific talks feature leading scientists and mathematicians and are intended to foster discourse and drive discovery among the broader NYC-area research community. We invite those interested in the topic to join us for this weekly lecture series.
Social interactions are essential for animals to survive, reproduce and raise their young. Over the years, Catherine Dulac’s lab has attempted to decipher the unique characteristics of social recognition: what are the unique cues that trigger distinct social behaviors, what is the nature and identity of social behavior circuits, how is the function of these circuits different in males and females and how are they modulated by the animal physiological status?
In this lecture, Dulac will describe her team’s recent progress in understanding how specific brain circuits and cell types direct adaptive changes in behavior during sickness episodes in mice. Finally, she will describe their recent work uncovering how different parts of the brain — as well as discrete, molecularly defined neuronal populations — participate in the positive and negative control of social interactions, providing a new framework to understand the regulation of social behaviors in health and disease.
About the Speaker
Dulac is the Samuel W. Morris University Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. She grew up in Montpellier, France, graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, and received her Ph.D. from the University of Paris. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University before joining the faculty of Harvard University, where she was department chair from 2007 to 2013. Her work explores the identity and function of neural circuits underlying social and sickness behaviors in mice. She is a member of the U.S. and French academies of sciences and the American Philosophical Society. She is an officer of the Legion d’Honneur and a recipient of multiple awards, including the Pradel, the Lounsbery and the Karl Spencer Lashley awards, the Ralph W. Gerard Prize and the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.