Presidential Lectures

In this lecture, David S. Mandell will talk about why autism interventions rarely are implemented in community practice and why they fail to achieve the same outcomes as those observed in clinical trials.

The study of genes and social behavior is still a young field. In this lecture, Gene E. Robinson will discuss some of the first insights to emerge that describe the relationship between them. These include the surprisingly close relationship between brain gene expression and specific behavioral states; social regulation of brain gene expression; control of social behavior by context-dependent rewiring of brain transcriptional regulatory networks; and evolutionarily conserved genetic toolkits for social behavior that span insects, fish and mammals.

This Biotech Symposium will focus on clinical and translational genomics and the shift to precision medicine.

In this lecture, Catherine Dulac will discuss the cellular and molecular architecture of neural circuits underlying instinctive social behaviors of mice. She will describe her group’s recent advances in uncovering the identity of sensory neurons that detect social cues and the identity of command circuits associated with specific social responses in male and female mice.

In this lecture, Yael Niv will argue that the key to learning efficiently in real-world scenarios is to use a simplified representation of the task that includes only those dimensions of the environment that are relevant to obtaining reward.

This lecture explores the biological bases of critical periods in brain development. Mechanisms that open and close windows of plasticity (E/I balance and molecular brakes, respectively) are implicated in autism, suggesting mistimed maturational processes that can be strategically rescued at the circuit level.