Know Science Celebrates Brain Awareness Week: A Neuroscience Speaker Series & Afterparty

Addiction, one of the most significant public health concerns in the United States today, is a medical disease, a disease of the brain.

Addiction has considerable medical, economic and social costs but unfortunately, ignorance about addiction, stigma surrounding addicts, and limited access to proper medical treatment of the addiction are widespread problems.

• Why is there still so much stigma around addiction?
• How do drugs change behavior?
• Drugs are able to hijack the circuitry of the brain to create a compulsive state but how does this occur?
• Why do some people become addicts and others don’t? 
• What are the medical treatments for addiction?

Derek Simon is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Rockefeller University researching the neuroscience of drug addiction using rodent behavioral models.

“The Amazing Infant Brain” Dr. Rosemarie Perry

While infants may often appear helpless, the infant brain is capable of things that the adult brain is not.

In this presentation, Dr. Perry will discuss the unique abilities of the infant brain, which functions as a “learning machine.”

She will talk about how caregivers can directly modulate infant learning and brain development.  Increased brain plasticity in early life, combined with the profound effects that a caregiver has on infant brain development, means that infants are particularly vulnerable to the effects of adversity, particularly from the caregiver.

The consequences of early life trauma on lifelong mental health and well-being will be discussed.

Dr. Rosemarie Perry is a developmental psychobiologist at New York University. Rosemarie holds a B.S. degree from the University of Delaware in Neuroscience and a Ph.D. from New York University in Physiology and Neuroscience.

“Love: It’s all in your head” Dr. Bianca Jones Marlin

Babies change everything. Dr. Marlin examines how the brain adapts to care for a newborn, and how a baby’s cry can control adult behavior. Her research focuses on the vital bond between parent and child, and investigates the use of neurochemicals, such as the “love drug” oxytocin, as a treatment to strengthen fragile and broken parent-child relationships.

Bianca Jones Marlin is a neuroscientist and postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University Medical School. She holds a PhD in neuroscience from New York University-School of Medicine, and dual bachelor degrees from St. John’s University, in biology and adolescent education. Her research has been featured in Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Scientific American, and Discover Magazine’s “100 Top Stories of 2015”. A native New Yorker, Bianca lives in Manhattan with her medical-scientist husband, Joe, and their cat, Santiago, named after the famed neuroanatomist Santiago Ramon y Cajal.

“The Persistence of Memory” by Dr. Loren DeVito

Memory is a beautiful enigma, a fascinating subject that has captured the hearts and minds of scientists, poets, and artists. With the advent of modern technology, neuroscientists have made astonishing advances in the study of memory across the last few decades.

This talk will focus on some of these findings, highlighting the importance of a basic understanding of how memory works.

Nearly every degenerative and cognitive disorder affects memory.

A greater understanding of how this circuitry normally functions can shed enormous light on how to fix these problems when these circuits go awry.

Dr. Loren M. DeVito is a medical and science writer and expert in memory research. She holds a BA from Cornell University in psychology and an MA and PhD from Boston University in neuroscience.