Dr. Sophie Caron: The ecological mind — making sense of the world with a tiny brain

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

Zoom option if unable to attend in person: Zoom link here (click on “Join a meeting”) Meeting ID: 91512 289258 Passcode: 289258 Brains are evolved to learn, enabling animals to respond flexibly to an unpredictable world and to draw on experience to guide future behaviors. To learn efficiently, brains need to balance a high degree of flexibility […]


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Dr. Sandeep Robert Datta: Structure and meaning in natural behavior

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

Zoom option if unable to attend in person: Zoom link here (click on “Join a meeting”) Meeting ID: 91512 289258 Passcode: 289258 Ethologists describing animals in the wild have long appreciated that naturalistic, self-motivated behavior is built from modules that are linked together over time into predictable sequences. Many such sequences are built to extract information from […]


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Dr. Simon Chen: Probing the temporal dynamics of noradrenaline release at fine spatial scales during motor learning in healthy and diseased brains

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

Zoom option if unable to attend in person: Zoom link here (click on “Join a meeting”) Meeting ID: 91512 289258 Passcode: 289258 Noradrenaline (NA) is a strong modulator of neuronal activity, and many symptoms in patients with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can be attributed to the maladaptive activity of locus coeruleus (LC), the main source of forebrain […]


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Dr. Sarah Morrow: Cognition in Multiple Sclerosis:The importance of integrating research findings into clinical practice.

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

Zoom option if unable to attend in person: Zoom link here (click on “Join a meeting”) Meeting ID: 91512 289258 Passcode: 289258 The objectives of this talk are to: Understand the importance of identifying cognitive complaints and cognitive impairment in persons with MS; Understand the impact cognition can have on persons with MS; Consider how cognition symptoms […]


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Dr. Julie Lefebvre: Molecular strategies for wiring neurons into circuits

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

Zoom option if unable to attend in person: Zoom link here (click on “Join a meeting”) Meeting ID: 91512 289258 Passcode: 289258 A critical step in neural circuit assembly is the integration of inhibitory interneurons with exquisite specificity in their numbers, distribution and synaptic connectivity. Our lab aims to identify cellular and molecular mechanisms that generate interneuron […]


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Dr. Cheryl Wellington: New CFI funded Core Facility

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

Zoom option if unable to attend in person: Zoom link here (click on “Join a meeting”) Meeting ID: 91512 289258 Passcode: 289258 Dr. Wellington will be introducing a new CFI funded Core Facility that will focus on fluid biomarkers relevant to clinical neurology and fundamental neuroscience.


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Dr. Pinar Ayata: Neurodegenerative functions of microglia in Alzheimer’s disease

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

Zoom option if unable to attend in person: Zoom link here (click on “Join a meeting”) Meeting ID: 91512 289258 Passcode: 289258 The brain’s primary immune cells, microglia, are a leading causal cell type in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Yet, the mechanisms by which microglia can drive neurodegeneration remain unresolved. Here, we discover that a conserved stress signaling […]


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Dr. Charan Ranganath: The boundaries of memory: How cortico-hippocampal interactions at event boundaries support memory and prediction.

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

Zoom option if unable to attend in person: Zoom link here (click on “Join a meeting”) Meeting ID: 91512 289258 Passcode: 289258 In neuroscience, episodic memory is depicted as a process of activating "engrams" in the hippocampus that provide a static and faithful record of the past. In reality, behavioral research has established that human memory is […]


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Dr. Wafaa Zaaraoui: In Vivo ²³Na MRI: Unveiling Sodium Homeostasis in Brain Function and Neurological Disorders

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

Zoom option if unable to attend in person: Zoom link here (click on “Join a meeting”) Meeting ID: 91512 289258 Passcode: 289258 Sodium (²³Na) MRI is a powerful tool for investigating sodium homeostasis in the brain, offering a unique, non-invasive method to study in vivo changes in sodium concentrations in both healthy and pathological conditions. Sodium plays […]


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Dr. Bence Olveczky: Neural circuits underlying learned motor sequences.

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

Our ability to sequence movements and actions in response to unpredictable environmental events underlies our rich and adaptive behavioral repertoire. Such flexible behaviors contrast with overtrained, or automatic, motor sequences directed at specific tasks and executed the same way every time. We probed how neural circuits underlie these distinct forms of motor sequence execution by […]


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Dr. Matthew Hill: Amygdalar Regulation of Neuroendocrine and Behavioral Responses to Threat and Stress

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

While the basolateral amygdala (BLA)  is known to be a highly stress sensitive region of the brain, there is surprisingly little understanding of the role the BLA plays in the orchestration of a stress response. The first portion of this talk will focus on the role of the BLA in regulating neuroendocrine responses to stress, […]


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Dr. Andrienne Antonson: Blueprint for the Developing Brain: Cues from Microbes, Myeloid Cells, and the Maternal-Fetal Interface

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

Emerging evidence suggests that key neurodevelopmental processes are shaped by immune and microbial signals during the prenatal period. My work is based on the premise that disruptions to these signals can alter neurodevelopmental trajectories and increase vulnerability to lifelong mental health disorders. Using a clinically translatable mouse model of maternal influenza infection, we demonstrate that […]


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