The seminar is sponsored by NYU-ECNU Institute of Brain and Cognitive Science at NYU Shanghai.
Abstract:
My lab is interested in the molecular and neural circuit mechanisms underlying emotional and social behaviors and psychiatric diseases.
While great advances have been made towards understanding the sensory representations of the external world, it has remained largely elusive how different emotions are represented in the brain. In one direction of our research, we introduced a dual activity mapping technique to simultaneously visualize the neural substrates of two stimuli with distinct emotional valences, with single cell resolution, With considerable precision, we have identified striking patterns of interaction between the appetitive and aversive neural ensembles, in various key limbic structures. In the nucleus accumbens (NAc), in particular, we discover topographically intermingled pattern of activation by positive and negative emotional cues, revealing the existence of a functional “valence map” (Xiu et al., Nature Neuroscience, 2014).
In a second line of research, we are investigating the neural circuit mechanism of social hierarchy, a most robust form of social behavior. We established that dominance ranking in group-housed mice is transitive, relatively stable, and highly correlated among multiple dominance measures. Using electrophysiology recording and viral-based gene manipulation, we found that social rank correlates with the synaptic strength in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and can be tweaked by molecular manipulations that alter the synaptic efficacy in mPFC (Wang et al., Science, 2011). Latest progress on optogenetical control of the dominance rank will be presented.
Biography:
Dr. Hailan Hu is the Professor and Senior Principal Investigator at the ZIINT and School of Medicine at Zhejiang University. Dr. Hu graduated from Beijing University with a B.S. degree in Biochemistry (1996). She pursued her Ph.D. degree in neuroscience at University of California at Berkeley with Prof. Corey Goodman. After completing PhD (2002), she conducted postdoctoral research with Dr. Julius Zhu at University of Virginia (2003-2004), and Dr. Roberto Malinow at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (2004-2008). Before joining Zhejiang University, Dr. Hu was a principal investigator at the Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences (2008-2015). Her laboratory seeks to understand how emotional and social behaviors are encoded and regulated in the brain. Dr. Hu is a recipient of the Howard Hughes Predoctoral Fellowship, the Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellowship, the CAS Excellent Mentorship (2012, 2014), the National Distinguished Young Scholar, the Meiji Life Science Award, L’Oreal Women Scientist Award and Changjiang Scholar Award.