How Serotonin Organizes Behaviors Across Timescales
Event Details
- Type
- Monday Lecture Series
- Speaker(s)
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Cori Bargmann, Ph.D., Vice President for Academic Affairs and Torsten N. Wiesel Professor and head, Lulu and Anthony Wang Laboratory of Neural Circuits and Behavior, The Rockefeller University
- Speaker bio(s)
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Rapid information processing within neuronal circuits is modulated on a slower timescale by internal states that rely upon neuromodulators such as serotonin and neuropeptides. These neuromodulators transiently rewire functional circuits to alter both spontaneous and sensory behaviors. Internal states can be tightly connected to an animal’s physiology, as exemplified by many changes in behavior that occur after an animal is exposed to pathogens. The regulation of these survival-relevant sickness behaviors by serotonin will be a primary subject of the talk.
Cori Bargmann is the Torsten N Wiesel Professor and Head of the Lulu and Anthony Wang Laboratory of Neural Circuits and Behavior at The Rockefeller University. Her research addresses the relationships between genes, circuits, and behaviors, including the basis of sensory recognition and preference, the circuits and neuromodulatory systems that regulate innate behaviors, the genetics of natural behavioral variation, and behavioral responses to pathogens. Her lab primarily studies these questions in the nematode C. elegans, which allows systems-level analysis of the nervous system and behavior at single-neuron and single-gene resolution.
Among other honors, she is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine and has received the Edward Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience, the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, and the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. In 2013-2014, she and Bill Newsome co-chaired the advisory group to the NIH Director for President Obama’s Brain Initiative. She was an HHMI Investigator from 1995 to 2016. In 2016 she became the first Head of Science at a new philanthropy, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a position she held until 2022 when she returned to her lab at Rockefeller full-time. Since 2023, she is also Rockefeller’s Vice President of Academic Affairs.
Bargmann graduated from the University of Georgia and received her Ph.D. from MIT, where she studied the neu/HER2 oncogene with Bob Weinberg at the Whitehead Institute. After a postdoctoral fellowship with Bob Horvitz at MIT, she was a faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco (1991-2004) before joining Rockefeller in 2004.
- Open to
- Campus Only