CANCELLED: Shared Neural Mechanisms of Fear and Habit: Translation to PTSD and Addiction
Description
**Due to the snowstorm, this talk has been cancelled and will be rescheduled at a later date to be determined.**
Shared neural circuitry may mediate risk for both Substance Use Disorders (SUDs) and PTSD, and the concept of habitual behavior may be equally applied to both addiction and fear-related behavior. Thus a neural-circuit and behavior-based framework for treating SUDs, such as alcoholism, and stress-related disorders, such as PTSD, is crucial for improvement in treatment and prevention.
Promising advances are being translated from basic science to the clinic, including approaches to distinguish risk versus resilience before trauma exposure, methods to interfere with fear development during memory consolidation after a trauma, and techniques to inhibit fear reconsolidation and to enhance extinction of chronic fear. Cutting edge approaches to understand the genetic and epigenetic regulation at a cell-type specific level within amygdala, medial prefrontal, and hippocampal circuitry as it relates to fear extinction will also be discussed. It is hoped that this new knowledge will translate to more successful, neuroscientifically informed and rationally designed approaches to disorders of fear and habit regulation.
Speaker Bio
Kerry J. Ressler, MD, PhD, is Chief Scientific Officer and James and Patricia Poitras Chair in Psychiatry at McLean Hospital, after serving at Emory University for 18 years. He is also a professor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and president-elect for the Society for Biological Psychiatry. Dr. Ressler was previously an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and is a member of the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine).
Dr. Ressler’s lab focuses on translational research bridging molecular neurobiology in animal models with human genetic research on emotion, particularly fear and anxiety disorders. He has published over 225 manuscripts ranging from basic molecular mechanisms of fear processing to understanding how emotion is encoded in a region of the brain called the amygdala, in both animal models and human patients.