The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Allison Doupe, M.D., Ph.D., professor, department of psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco

Speaker bio(s)

An amazing capacity of humans is our ability to learn to speak. Songbirds provide one of the few animal models for speech learning: like humans, they must hear the sounds of adults during a sensitive period, and then must hear their own voice while learning to vocalize.  They also possess networks of brain regions required for song learning, with many similarities to mammalian brains. One of these brain regions is a basal ganglia circuit specialized for song. Basal ganglia circuits are critical for learning and control of movements in all vertebrates, and are a site of many neurologic and psychiatric diseases. However, despite their importance, they remain in many ways mysterious. The study of the songbird basal ganglia pathway has shown that one of its key functions is to actively generate song variability, which may be important for trial-and-error motor learning. Moreover, this circuit is strikingly sensitive to social cues, which alter its neural activity and the resulting song. Experimental manipulations of this pathway are also revealing which aspects of its firing are crucial for learning. Because the basal ganglia circuit for song is specialized for a simple behavior, it is providing very general insights into how such circuits function, both normally and in disease.

Dr. Doupe earned a Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard University and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1984. She was an intern at Massachusetts General Hospital and completed her residency in psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles Neuropsychiatric Institute. Following her work as a postdoctoral fellow in neurobiology at the California Institute of Technology, in 1993 she became assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, and was named professor in 2002. She is also director of the university's Center for Integrative Neuroscience. Among Dr. Doupe's many honors are a Klingenstein Fellowship in the Neurosciences, a McKnight Investigator Award, a Searle Scholarship, a Merck Fellowship and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. She is a diplomat of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has served on the editorial boards of several leading journals, including the Journal of Neurobiology.

Open to

Public

Reception

Refreshments, 3:15 p.m. - 3:45 p.m., Abby Lounge

Contact

Gloria Phipps

Phone

(212) 327-8967

Sponsor

Gloria Phipps
(212) 327-8967
pihippsg@rockefeller.edu