Genome-wide approaches to understanding microglia identity and function

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

Microglia are the macrophages of the brain and participate to its development, homeostasis, and defense against pathogens and injuries. Notably, genetic evidence suggests that they are critically involved in neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease. However, our knowledge of the molecular processes that regulate these cells in the brain remains very rudimentary. Over the past few […]


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Development of a whole-brain memory trace pipeline for activity-dependent tagging murine lines

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

We previously created a mouse model to permanently label neurons activated during learning, the ArcCreERT2 mice (Denny et al., 2014, Neuron). In our first publication, we extensively characterized the ArcCreERT2 mice and manipulated various parameters to correlate behavioral expression with memory tagging. Using contextual fear conditioning (CFC), we showed that mice re-exposed to a fearful […]


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Reporting Options for Sexualized Violence

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

SVPRO is back for a second session! This session will focus on the different options that are available for reporting when sexualized violence has occurred. Not everyone wants to report after being impacted by sexualized violence, and that’s completely okay. When folks do want to report, it’s important that they know the full range of […]


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The effects of maternal immune activation on early development in an outbred strain of mice

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

Our lab is interested in the neural bases for social function, and we use mouse models for diseases that have social deficits at their core. This talk will present our recent work looking at postnatal development, juvenile behaviours and autophagy in a mouse model of perinatal infection. Rudy North Lecture Theatre "Live" Screening Zoom option […]


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Spontaneous activity, memory replay, and the default mode network

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

Spontaneous activity accounts for most of what the brain does and is likely to be key for information processing in the brain, but its function is still quite mysterious. Two key spontaneous activity processes are the Default Mode Network (DMN), a set of areas that are most markedly connected and active during behavioural idleness, and […]


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Dr. Cheryl Wellington: Fluid biomarkers in neurology: Clinical and translational studies

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

Diseases of the brain are among the most challenging disorders to diagnose and treat. Unlike cancer, where human tissue biopsy specimens are routinely collected, brain disorders lack routine access to specimens that are essential to make progress in understanding pathophysiology and developing effective treatments. Currently, most brain diseases are studied in living patients using neuroimaging […]


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Dr. Jorn Diedrichsen: Exploring the role of the human cerebellum across functional domains

The cerebellum has evolved to support basic sensory-motor functions. In the human brain, the cerebellar circuitry has dramatically expanded and contributes to virtually every cognitive function, including working memory, language, and social cognition. Given its uniform cytoarchitecture, it has long been hypothesized that the cerebellar circuit performs a common computation across all these functional domains. […]


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Dr. Rutsuko Ito: Ventral hippocampal circuits and the arbitration of approach-avoidance conflict

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

Approach-avoidance (AA) conflict resolution is a form of decision making that is fundamentally important for survival and requires the effective evaluation of affective stimuli or events with mixed outcomes (positive and negative). Despite the prevailing view of hippocampal involvement in learning and memory processes, the hippocampus is also thought to be involved in the resolution […]


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Dr. Kate Wassum: Amygdala circuitry in reward learning and decision making

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

To make adaptive decisions we must cast ourselves into the future and consider the outcomes of our potential choices. This prospective consideration is informed by our memories. I will discuss our lab’s recent work investigating the neural circuits responsible for encoding, updating, and retrieving reward memories for use in the considerations underlying decision making. We […]


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Dr. Edward F. Chang: Towards a Speech Neuroprosthetic

Rudy North Lecture Theatre, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health 2215 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver

Speaking is a unique and defining human behavior.  Over the past decade, we have focused on deciphering the basic neural code that underlies our ability to speak fluently. During speech production, vocal tract movement gestures for all speech sounds are encoded by highly specialized neural activity, organized as a map, in the human speech motor […]


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Neuroscience Research Colloquium

The Neuroscience Research Colloquium (NRC), is a series of lectures featuring local and international neuroscientists.