Doors @ 5:00 PM
How does human behavior change across the lifespan?
How do our cognitive and psychosocial abilities change and how can these changes inform our understanding of disorders that develop at different life stages?
Join us for talks from two neuroscientists to learn about two behaviors influenced by different stages of life: social cooperation in adolescence, and anorexia in aging.
Meet our speakers:
Gabriela Rosenblau
Talk Title: Strategic games as a window into how and why we cooperate with others
Gabriela Rosenblau is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and a member of the Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders Institute at George Washington University (GWU). Her research combines computational and neuroscientific methods to understand the neurobiological mechanisms underlying social behavior in neurotypical and clinical populations, especially Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Initiating and sustaining cooperation are considered important prosocial skills. Cooperation hinges on trust, our overall perception that our interaction partner has similar prosocial tendencies. It also hinges on rational choice, preferring an outcome that benefits us. Prosocial and rational tendencies have been pitted against each other as potential explanations for why humans cooperate. Her talk will focus on how they can be disentangled and why this may help to better understand autism phenotypes.
Frankie D. Heyward
Talk Title: The quest to understand the anorexia of aging
Frankie D. Heyward is currently an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School working with Dr. Evan Rosen, and will be starting his own lab at the Center for Hypothalamic Research at UT Southwestern this Fall. The overarching goal of his work is to understand how neurotoxic insults and aging contribute to persistent impairments in the cells in the brain that control appetite and body weight. Frankie is the Founder and President of the National Black Postdoctoral Association.
Fluctuations in appetite are a common occurrence for us all, with hunger increasing between meals and subsiding following a meal. Yet we know shockingly little about the neurobiological drivers of hunger, in general, and even less about the gene-expression changes that influence a key population of hunger-promoting neurons. His talk will focus on his quest to identify the genes whose expression is changed during periods of hunger, including how these genes change across aging.