Lynn A. Raymond – Presidential Lecture
Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia
Title of Presentation: Mechanisms and neuroprotective strategies in neurodegeneration: Huntington disease can lead the way
Dr. Lynn Raymond’s research aims to understand how specific neurons are targeted for degeneration in Huntington’s disease. Her laboratory is specifically interested in the role specific glutamate receptors, called the NMDA receptors, play in this process. NMDA receptors also play a key role in neuroplasticity during development and in activity-dependent modifications in the adult brain that may contribute to learning and memory. A major focus of Dr. Raymond’s laboratory is to elucidate the mechanisms regulating NMDA receptor function.
View more – including list of selected publications and distinctions.
Michael E. Greenberg – Keynote speaker
Professor of Neurobiology
Head of the Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School
Title of Presentation: Signaling Networks that Regulate Synapse Development and Cognitive Function
Over the last two decades Dr. Greenberg has served as a leader in the field of molecular neurobiology. His research has revealed a complex activity-regulated gene expression program relevant to synapse development and neural circuitry and has contributed greatly to our understanding of neurological diseases in which these processes have gone awry.
View more – including list of selected publications and distinctions. A short biography of Dr. Greenberg is also available.
Eric J. Nestler – Plenary Speaker
Nash Family Professor of Neuroscience,
Chair, Dept of Neuroscience &
Director, Friedman Brain Institute, Mount Sinai School of Medicine
Presentation Title: New Insight into the Neurobiology of Depression
Dr. Eric Nestler’s research aims to better understand the molecular mechanisms of drug addiction and depression. His laboratory uses animal models of these disorders to identify the ways in which drugs of abuse or stress change the brain to lead to addiction- or depression-like syndromes, and to use this information to develop improved treatments of these disorders.
View more – including list of selected publications and distinctions.
Edward S. Boyden, Plenary Speaker
Leader, Synthetic Neurobiology Group
Associate Professor and AT&T Chair, MIT Media Lab and McGovern Institute,
Departments of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Co-Director, MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering
New York Stem Cell Foundation-Robertson Investigator and
Paul Allen Distinguished Investigator
Presentation Title: Tools for Mapping Brain Computations
Dr. Ed Boyden is an expert in inventing new tools for neuroscience for understanding and controlling neural circuits, to reveal their underlying mechanisms and to reveal principles of treating neural disorders. He is a neuroscientist, but also skilled at many domains of engineering, ranging from nanoengineering to chemistry, genomics, optics and electrical engineering. He works with multidisciplinary teams including physicists, chemists, computer scientists, clinicians, and hardware engineers, and collaborates with labs around the world to bring new technologies to bear upon the study of the brain. His lab at MIT, and their partners, have shared the tools they have developed with 1000 research groups from around the world.
View more – including list of selected publications and distinctions.
Jay A. Gottfried, Plenary Speaker
Associate Professor in Ken and Ruth Davee Department of Neurology, Northwestern University
Presentation Title: All Roads Lead to Smell: What Odors Can Teach Us About Brain Function
As a physician, Dr. Gottfried sees patients with memory loss, dementia, neurobehavioral syndromes, and central disorders of smell loss.
As a scientist, he uses a combination of sensory psychophysics, functional MRI, physiological recordings, multivariate pattern analysis, computational modeling, and more recently, intracranial EEG techniques, to understand how odor information is encoded and stored in the human brain, and how emotion, learning, and experience modulate this information at the perceptual and neural levels.
View a short bio of Dr. Gottfried
