Catherine Dulac

Catherine Dulac is the Xander University Professor at Harvard University and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She graduated from the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, she received her PhD from the University of Paris VI at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Embryology (Nogent-sur-Marne), and was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. Dulac and her team are working to understand the molecular, neuronal, and circuit basis of instinctive social behaviors. They apply molecular, genetic, and optical techniques in their investigations of the social brain, using the mouse as a model organism. They are pursuing several projects at the molecular, cellular and systems levels in order to investigate the architecture and functional logic of neuronal circuits underlying social behaviors. The key questions they are addressing are: What are the sensory signals that trigger specific social behaviors? What are the brain areas involved in processing these signals and generating species- and sex-specific behaviors such as aggression, mating, parental behavior, defensive behavior? What is the molecular identity of the neurons involved, how are they connected to each other, and how are they modulated by the animal physiological state and its previous social experience? And finally, how do circuits underlying sex-specific behaviors differ in the male and female brains? To learn more visit here.

Talk title: TBD