This seminar will be held in the Neurological Institute of New York's Auditorium (1st floor). Columbia University's Intercampus Shuttle Service is the best way to travel between campuses.

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

Heightened aggression is characteristic of multiple neuropsychiatric disorders and can have a wide variety of negative effects on patients, their families and the public. Recent studies in humans and animals have implicated brain reward circuits in aggression and suggest that, in subsets of aggressive individuals, repeated domination of subordinate social targets is rewarding. Our work has defined novel roles for brain reward circuitry in encoding information about social stimuli and subsequently regulating the motivational aspects of aggressive behavior. We believe this work to be critical for development of new treatment strategies for pathological aggression, which represents an area of drug development that has lagged far behind other efforts in neuropsychiatry.

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.