NIH Director’s Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series

The NIH Director’s Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series, colloquially known as WALS, is the highest-profile lecture program at the NIH. Traditionally, lectures have occurred on most Wednesdays from September through June from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. ET in Lipsett auditorium, Building 10 on the NIH Bethesda campus.

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Mechanisms and Meaning for Smell

Sandeep Robert Datta, M.D., Ph.D.
Harvard Medical School

Nearly all animals depend upon smell to usefully interact with the world. Although underappreciated, smell is also critical to humans, as patients with olfactory loss face substantial additional risks for injury, psychiatric disease, and death. However, smell remains a mystery — we know little about how odor information is organized in the brain, and even less about how odors are linked to perception. Here I review the canonical mechanisms thought to enable olfaction, and discuss recent surprises that are revising our ideas about how our sense of smell might work.

Discovering and Regulating Brain Networks Underlying Emotions

Kafui Dzirasa, Ph.D.
Duke University, School of Medicine

Kafui Dzirasa is an American psychiatrist and Associate Professor at Duke University. He looks to understand the relationship between neural circuit malfunction and mental illness. He was a 2019 AAAS Leshner Fellow and was elected Fellow of the National Academy of Medicine in 2021.

This page was last updated on Monday, January 6, 2025