Neurobiology of Sickness and Social Behavior

Social interactions are essential for animals to survive, reproduce and raise their young. Over the years, Catherine Dulac’s lab has attempted to decipher the unique characteristics of social recognition: what are the unique cues that trigger distinct social behaviors, what is the nature and identity of social behavior circuits, how is the function of these circuits different in males and females and how are they modulated by the animal physiological status?

In this lecture, Dulac will describe her team’s recent progress in understanding how specific brain circuits and cell types direct adaptive changes in behavior during sickness episodes in mice. Finally, she will describe their recent work uncovering how different parts of the brain — as well as discrete, molecularly defined neuronal populations — participate in the positive and negative control of social interactions, providing a new framework to understand the regulation of social behaviors in health and disease.

Dulac is the Samuel W. Morris University Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. She grew up in Montpellier, France, graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, and received her Ph.D. from the University of Paris. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University before joining the faculty of Harvard University, where she was department chair from 2007 to 2013. Her work explores the identity and function of neural circuits underlying social and sickness behaviors in mice. She is a member of the U.S. and French academies of sciences and the American Philosophical Society. She is an officer of the Legion d’Honneur and a recipient of multiple awards, including the Pradel, the Lounsbery and the Karl Spencer Lashley awards, the Ralph W. Gerard Prize and the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.