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Developmental Origins of Mental Illness
"On Being a Circuit Psychiatrist"
Joshua Gordon, MD, PhD
Director, National Institute of Mental Health
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Free and open to the public
"The infantile amnesia paradox: a critical period of learning to learn and remember"
Cristina Alberini, PhD
Professor, Center for Neural Science
New York University
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Free and open to the public
"Modeling Prenatal Cortical Development Using Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells"
Flora M. Vaccarino, MD
Harris Professor at the Child Study Center
Professor in the Dept. of Neuroscience, Yale University of Medicine
Free and Open to the public. Click here for more information and please register here
"Sensitive periods in affective development: nonlinear maturation of fear learning"
Francis Lee, MD, PhD
Mortimer D. Sackler Porfessor, Dept of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medicine
Free and open to the public - click here for more information and click here to register
"Reasoning to learn, learning to reason"
Silvia Bunge, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Psychology & Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute
Director, Building Blocks of Cognition Laboratory
University of California at Berkeley
Free and open to the public
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"Examining how the CNS works by unravelling sub-second pain behavior"
Clifford Woolf, PhD
Director, F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center, Boston Children's Hospital
Professor of Neurology and Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School
Free and open to the public
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The Functional Organization of the Human Brain as a Window into the Architecture of the Mind.
Nancy Kanwisher, PhD
Walter A. Rosenblight,
M.I.T.
Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences
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Dysregulation of the HPA axis in postpartum depression and the negative impact on offspring behavior
Jamie Maguire, PhD
Tufts University School of Medicine,
Department of Neuroscience
Assistant Professor
A quarter century of glutamate: physiological and therapeutic implications of the PCP/NMDA model of schizophrenia
DANIEL C. JAVITT, M.D., PH.D.
Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience
Director, Division of Experimental Therapetics,
Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University
CONTE COLLOQUIUM ON MENTAL HEALTH:
Guoping Feng, PhD
Investigator, McGovern Institute and Professor, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Institute Member, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Dissecting synaptic and circuitry mechanisms of psychiatric disorders
Why is it harder to learn languages when you’re older? Why do star athletes and master musicians start training young? Why are certain medical conditions reversible in kids, but not in adults?
The answer to all of these questions and many more lies in the existence of ‘critical periods’—windows of time in human and animal development when environmental experience molds neural circuits. While experience can influence the brain long before and after critical periods, the sculpting power of its hand is never quite as strong than as during these periods of heightened plasticity.
A couple weeks ago, I attended an annual gathering of superheroes called “Blue Sky Girls Day.” At first glance, these people look ordinary. There wear no special capes or tights, and they summon their strongest powers for things most people take for granted. Like walking, talking, grasping objects, eating, drinking, sleeping—sometimes even breathing.
Yet many of these daily activities present epic battles for individuals with Rett Syndrome, a rare neurodevelopmental disorder that almost exclusively affects females and is caused by sporadic mutations in the X-chromosome gene MeCP2. What these individuals and their families quietly accomplish each day in real life is more impressive than the feats of any movie superhero. This is because one of the hallmarks of Rett is a striking developmental regression—in which children who seem to be developing normally all of a sudden lose the ability to speak or make purposeful hand movements—developing autism-like behavioral symptoms in addition to potentially experiencing seizures, scoliosis, breathing difficulties, gastrointestinal problems and other issues.
