The pre-conference workshop was held on November 10th, 2023 at Hyatt Place Washington DC/ Whitehouse, 1522 K St NW, Washington, DC. Please click SCHEDULE to see details for the pre-conference workshop, fellowship group event, and recommended lectures. 

Dr. Zoe Donaldson is an Associate Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder. She studies how close social bonds, such as those that mediate friendships and romantic love, are encoded in the brain. To understand the cells and molecules that make bonding possible and identify their involvement in grieving and loss, her lab uses monogamous prairie voles. Unlike rats and mice, these rodents form lifelong pair bonds between mates akin to human romantic partnerships. Her research hopes to identify novel treatments for psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders. She has been highlighted in the Economist and the Washington Post. 

Lin, F., Zuo, Y., Conwell, Y., Wang, K. New Horizons in Emotional Well-being and Brain Aging: Potential Lessons from Cross-species Research. International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry (2023)

Congradulations to Dr. Ehsan Adeli of Stanford University and Dr. Zoe Donaldson of UC Boulder for recieving pilot funding for their projects. 

Sarah Therrien*†, Adam Turnbull*†, Mia Anthony*, Yeates Conwell, Feng Vankee Lin. Influence of Affective States on Informant Impression of Neuropsychiatric Symptoms in people living with MCI. Aging & Mental Health (2023).

Conwell Y., Lin FV., Wang, K. Can Emotional Well-Being Maintain Health and Prevent Suicide in Later Life? A National Priority for Research. American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry (2023) 

Peralta-Malváez, L.*†, Turnbull, A. *†, Anthony, M*. Adeli, E., Lin FV. CCA identifies a neurophysiological marker of adaptation capacity that is reliably linked to internal locus of control of cognition in amnestic MCI, GeroScience (2023)

Stacey M. Schaefer is a cognitive-affective neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Institute on Aging. Dr. Schaefer is P.I. of the longitudinal Midlife in the United States National Study of Health and Wellbeing (MIDUS) Affective Neuroscience Project. She received her B.S. in Psychology and Zoology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Ph.D. in Psychology with a specialization in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on identifying the linkages between individual differences in affective chronometry measures of emotional responses, health, wellbeing, and brain aging, as well as the sociodemographic, psychosocial, and lifestyle factors that moderate those relationships. Dr. Schaefer is also P.I. of a study in collaboration with the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer Prevention examining how emotional processes may differ in preclinical Alzheimer's Disease, how these emotional differences relate to memory and cognition changes, as well as to tau and amyloid levels.  Finally, Dr. Schaefer is co-PI (with Dr. Richard J. Davidson) of a large R01 study examining how individual differences in the time course of emotional responses (measured with neuroimaging, psychophysiology, and ecological momentary assessment) are important for mental health, stress regulation, the immune system, cognition, and coping with the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Congratulations to Mia Anthony, a senior PhD student at University of Rochester, on receiving a two-year NIH fellowship to examine positive affective experience as a mechanism for explaining how some older adults with neurodegeneration maintain intact cognitive function. 

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education; Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences; Committee on Accelerating Behavioral Science through Ontology Development and Use. Ontologies in the Behavioral Sciences: Accelerating Research and the Spread of Knowledge. Beatty AS, Kaplan RM, editors. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2022 May 17. PMID: 35593779.

Dacher Keltner (dacherkeltner.com) is a Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley and faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center (greatergood.berkeley.edu). Dacher’s research focuses on the biological and cultural evolution of compassion, awe, love, beauty, and humility, as well as power, social class, and inequality (dacherkeltner.com). Dacher is the author of many scientific articles and several books, including Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence, and AWE: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/622175/awe-by-dacher-keltner/). Dacher has won many research, teaching, and service awards, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has consulted for Apple, Pinterest, Google, the Sierra Club, and was a scientific consultant for Pixar’s Inside Out and Soul and for the Center for Constitutional Rights in its work to outlaw solitary confinement.

Dr. Yi Zuo received B.S. in Biology from Tsinghua University in China, and Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Northwestern University in the United States. She received postdoctoral training at New York University and the University of Texas at Austin, before joining the faculty of the Department of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology at University of California Santa Cruz in 2007. Dr. Zuo received the Committee on Women in Neuroscience Career Development Award in 2006 and was a Sloan Fellow (2007), an Ellison Medical Foundation New Scholar (2007), and a finalist for the Blavatnik National Award for Young Scientists (2015). She has been teaching the Neurobiology summer course at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA since 2006, and directing the Advanced Neuroimaging Techniques winter course at the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience since 2016. Dr. Zuo’s lab studies how experiences affect mammalian neural circuits through synaptic modifications, and investigates its implications for neurological and psychiatric disorders, using in vivo structural and functional imaging, mouse genetics, and mouse behavioral analysis. 

We are please to announce this year's Pilot Award Program awardees are Adam Turnbull, PhD of the University of Rochester and Ju Lu, PhD of UC Santa Cruz. 

Sarah Garfinkel is Professor at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, where she leads the Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Group. She completed her PhD in Experimental Psychology the University of Sussex, before undergoing a fellowship in Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the University of Michigan. Her current work focuses on brain-body interactions underlying emotion and cognition, with a particular focus on the heart. Adopting a translational perspective, she investigates altered cardiac-neural mechanisms in different clinical conditions. In September 2018, Sarah was named by the journal Nature as one of 11 "Rising Star" researchers, across all STEM disciplines internationally. Sarah is also involved in the public engagement of science where she contributes to science programmes on BBC TV and radio.

The objective of this workshop is to introduce the principles and applications of neuroimaging techniques for the study of brain aging. This workshop is aimed towards students, post-doctoral fellows, and faculty who are new to the field and who are interested in an orientation on neuroimaging and brain aging research. Presentations in this workshop are given by leaders in the fields of animal, human, and cross-species brain imaging.