Columbia University in the City of New York

Apr 30, 20193:00 pm
Seminar

Dopamine-dependent Reinforcement of Song Memories and Vocal Performance

Featuring Richard Mooney, PhD, George Barth Geller Professor of Neurobiology, Department of Neurobiology, Duke University

April 30th, 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm at the Jerome L. Greene Science Center (9th floor lecture hall)

**Please note this seminar will begin at the special time of 3:00 pm.**

This seminar will be held in the Jerome L. Greene Science Center on Columbia's Manhattanville campus (9th floor lecture hall). Columbia University's Intercampus Shuttle Service is the best way to travel between campuses.

Vocalizations are an essential medium for social communication in most vertebrates.  Whereas many types of vocalizations are innate, humans and a few other animal groups culturally transmit their species typical vocalizations. How the brain enables the learning of complex, culturally transmitted behaviors such as speech remains largely unknown. The presentation will cover fundamental discoveries from Dr. Mooney's lab highlighting how the brain enables the learning of birdsong, a behavior with many parallels to human speech. Indeed, gain and loss of function methods, including genetic perturbations of neural activity in freely singing birds, reveal that the auditory memorization of the tutor song and the conversion of this memory into a vocal pattern involve two distinct dopamine-dependent synaptic plasticity mechanisms.

Richard Mooney, PhD, has served as a George Barth Geller Professor of Research in Neurobiology since 2010. He joined Duke’s Department of Neurobiology in 1994. Dr. Mooney’s research examines the role of auditory experience in the development of brain and behavior, and the interplay between auditory and motor brain regions that enables vocal communication. He and his colleagues have identified how auditory experience alters the structure and function of nerve cells important to learned vocal communication, how these neurons are activated during expressive and receptive aspects of vocal communication, and the link between the auditory properties of these neurons and vocal perception. His group uses a wide variety of methods to this end, including in vivo multiphoton imaging and electrophysiological recordings of neurons in freely vocalizing animals, viral methods to manipulate gene expression in neurons, and acoustic analysis of vocalizations. Dr. Mooney has received a Wiersma Visiting Professorship at Caltech, a Dart Foundation Scholar’s Award, a McKnight Investigator Award, a Sloane Research Fellowship, a Klingenstein Research Fellowship and a Helen Hay Whitney Fellowship.  He was also honored to receive the Master Teaching Award, the Davison Teaching Award and the Langford Prize from Duke University. Dr. Mooney earned a BS in Biology from Yale University and a PhD in Neurobiology from the California Institute of Technology. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University, he was appointed to the faculty of the Department of Neurobiology in the Duke University School of Medicine.

Those who wish to meet the speaker during their visit should contact David Barack (Salzman lab). For general inquiries please contact [email protected].

The Columbia Neuroscience Seminar series is a collaborative effort of Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, the Department of Neuroscience, the Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior and the Columbia Translational Neuroscience Initiative, and with support from the Kavli Institute for Brain Science.

Venue: the Jerome L. Greene Science Center (9th floor lecture hall)
3227 Broadway, New York, NY 10027

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