2019 Amygdala Function in Emotion, Cognition and Disease GRS/GRC

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PROJECT SUMMARY The Amygdala Function in Emotion, Cognition & Disease Gordon Research Conference (GRC) is the seventh biennial installment of a five-day meeting scheduled for August 4-9, 2019 at Stonehill College, Easton Massachusetts, to be chaired by Kay Tye and Thomas Kash. The amygdala has been identified as a central node within brain systems subserving an array of higher-order behaviors that are disturbed in various mental disorders. Thus, the focus of the meeting reflects on ongoing shift in psychiatry towards framing the study of mental illness in terms of aberrant neural circuit functions. The aims are 1) to foster interactions across disciplines (from basic discovery research to translational research) related to understanding the role of the amygdala in mediating higher-order behaviors and mental disease states, particularly those characterized by addiction & anxiety, 2) to highlight important new tools and techniques that may be applied to the study of the amygdala, with the hope of opening new scientific questions and avenues of research, and 3) to mentor a new generation of scientists and scientist-clinicians, particularly women and those from minority groups, in a highly supportive and inclusive setting. The meeting will open with a Keynote session consisting of two plenary lectures by pioneers in neuroscience (BJ Casey, and Richard Palmiter), selected to bring their unique and authoritative perspectives on the state of the field. Over the next four days, there will be a total of twelve sessions, each on a dedicated theme, featuring oral presentations from recognized world-leaders in the study of addiction, emotion, and cognition. In addition to their status in the field, important criteria for our selection of speakers is that they represent an interdisciplinary scientific breadth and a diversity in gender and nationality. The GRC will be preceded by a GRS, a unique two-day forum for graduate students, post-docs, and other junior scientists to present and exchange new data and cutting edge ideas. Interest in the amygdala, a brain structure known to play a pivotal role in emotional and reward processes, has increased considerably in recent years. Indeed, there is marked overlap in the amygdala plasticity mechanisms found to be maladaptive in models of, for example, drug abuse and anxiety. A central goal of the meeting is to integrate addiction and reward related work into the permanent fabric of this GRC by including a keynote lecture and a number of the sessions that explicitly focus on these areas of research, with talks from NIDA and NIAAA funded leaders in the science of abuse and addiction.