Events

Understanding how the brain encodes, stores, and uses information is a central goal of neuroscience. Many neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders, including autism spectrum disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and Alzheimer’s disease, may arise from disrupted information processing. Thus, uncovering the neural mechanisms by which information is represented in the brain is not only key to […]

Dr. Mayo will talk about studies involving animal-to-human translational work highlighting how endocannabinoid function regulates stress reactivity and fear learning, leveraging human behavioral pharmacology and neuroimaging. She will also highlight outcomes from a recent clinical trial exploring how augmenting cannabinoid function impacts clinical, behavioral, and neural measures in people with PTSD.

Natural visual processing entails a complex interplay between sensory input, behavioral context, and on-going brain dynamics. Our lab seeks to understand how these processes give rise to goal-directed visual behaviors, by exploring the neural circuits mediating ethologically relevant behaviors that laboratory mice perform, including prey capture and distance estimation. We are also implementing novel experimental […]

This talk will highlight recent efforts to generate and analyze spatially resolved molecular datasets to better understand structure–function relationships in the human brain, particularly in the context of complex brain disorders. While single-cell and single-nucleus sequencing approaches have rapidly advanced our ability to define molecularly distinct cell populations, these methods often lack the spatial and […]

Despite decades of research on the properties of ventral tegmental area (VTA) dopamine neurons, the precise information encoded by these cells in reward learning and motivated behavior remains uncertain. In this talk, I will describe recent work investigating two distinct modalities of the midbrain dopamine system at different levels of investigation. First, I will present […]