Events

There is substantial individual variability in how individuals respond to stress, and a major predictor of this variance is the prior experience of stress. Here, I’ll share data showing that prior stress inflates negative valence signals in an amygdala-hypothalamic circuit and increases stress vulnerability.

How does the brain maintain stable internal representations of the world while also remaining flexible enough to learn, adapt, and predict the future?  This is a central question in systems neuroscience.  In this talk, I will present recent work from my lab that addresses this problem at both the level of network dynamics and the […]

This presentation will review the need for a precision medicine approach to opioid withdrawal and illustrate how variability in withdrawal symptom expression would inform novel treatment strategies. Differences in withdrawal presentation as a result of illicit fentanyl exposure will be reviewed and results from a randomized trial comparison of a new medication for withdrawal management […]

The talk will undertake an overview of the physiology of the human dying process as an in vivo model of brain ischemia physiology. The talk will cover the feasibility of undertaking this work at VGH and the characterization of the physiology of circulatory arrest in humans. Additionally, I will describe preliminary insights into the changes […]

Human cognition and mental health do not arise from the brain alone, but from continuous interactions among people, bodies, and social environments. This talk introduces a multi-brain perspective on neuroscience that connects research on consciousness with new directions in psychiatry. Using recent advances that enable multiple brains to be recorded simultaneously, we explore how everyday […]

Neurons are defined by their remarkable polarity, a feature that is highly conserved across most nervous systems. A key neuronal structure, the axon initial segment (AIS), is essential for establishing and maintaining a functional, polarized neuronal architecture. As such, defects in the AIS and a loss of polarity are associated with neurological dysfunction and numerous […]

A key behavioral characteristic of autistic individuals is difficulty with mentalization—the ability to understand and respond to the mental states of others. While these difficulties have important social and clinical consequences, the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying them remain poorly understood. In this presentation, I will argue that one reason for this lack of progress is the limitation of standard experimental approaches […]