
A New Biology for Stress and Mental Illness
Description
Though short-term stress is adaptive, long-term stress is clearly associated with disease vulnerability, including mental illness. Despite a significant disease-related societal burden stemming from mental health disorders, there remain significant gaps in our scientific understanding of the genesis, progression, and treatment of stress-induced mental illness. These challenges include a failure to identify the "tipping point" between adaptive and maladaptive stress exposure, variable responses to stress across brain regions, and a complete lack of strategies to prevent mental illness. I will discuss these and other challenges in light of our recent discovery and characterization of a previously unrecognized branch of the stress response, mediated by the hormone ghrelin. I will show that stress-related increases in ghrelin drive maladaptation in multiple, parallel neural systems and reveal newly uncovered biological mechanisms by which these changes occur. I will also discuss our work extending these findings to humans, and the exciting and novel implications for the treatment of disease in patient populations.
Speaker Bio
Ki Ann Goosens joined the McGovern Institute at MIT as a Principal Investigator in the fall of 2006 after completing her post-doctoral research with Dr. Robert Sapolsky at Stanford University under a fellowship from the National Science Foundation. She received a Ph.D. in Biopsychology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2002, where she earned awards for the most outstanding dissertation and for outstanding undergraduate teaching. While there, she was the first and only student in any psychology program to receive a Howard Hughes Predoctoral Fellowship in the Biological Sciences. She received a B.A. with Distinction in Cognitive Science with a Concentration in Neuroscience from the University of Virginia, where she was a Howard Hughes Undergraduate Research Apprentice, in 1995.