Neural Representations of Social Homeostasis
to
Kay Tye, Ph.D.
Professor, Systems Neurobiology Laboratory
Wylie Vale Chair
Salk Institute
Kay M. Tye is a Professor and Wylie Vale Chair of the Systems Neuroscience Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences, and an adjunct faculty member at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Her research program is focused on understanding the neurobiological mechanisms underlying social and emotional processes at the circuit, cellular and synaptic levels, particularly those relevant to psychiatric disease. Professor Tye has been recognized with a number of prestigious research awards including the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the Society for Neuroscience Young Investigator Award, Technology Review’s Top 35 Innovators under 35, and the NIH Director's Pioneer Award. She has also been recognized with a number of awards for mentoring at the undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral level. Further, she is committed to outreach, promoting diversity and inclusion in science.
Summary
Kay Tye’s lab seeks to understand the neural-circuit basis of emotion that leads to motivated behaviors such as social interaction, reward-seeking and avoidance. This talk will describe how her lab employs a multidisciplinary approach including cellular-resolution recordings, behavioral assays and optogenetics, a technique that activates certain cells with light, to find mechanistic explanations for how these emotional and motivational states influence behavior in health and disease. She focuses on an area of the brain called the amygdala as well as an interconnected circuit called the limbic system, which is implicated in emotional states such as fear. By using optogenetics, she can control specific neurons in the amygdala to decipher their function, genetic signature and communication patterns. Her lab has shown that these differences lead to either positive or negative reinforcement in the brain. This may explain why, for example, the sound of a gunshot is stressful for a refugee who has experienced war, but induces excitement in a runner about to start a race. The findings from Tye’s lab may help to inform treatments for a multitude of neuropsychiatric conditions such as anxiety, depression, addiction and impairments in social behavior.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 18, 2022