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News, Announcements, and Events
Upcoming Events and Recent News
Presentation by Dr. Stacey Schaefer: Investigations of emotion, aging, and the brain in the longitudinal MIDUS Affective Neuroscience Project to better understand the role of emotions in wellbeing and brain health throughout adulthood.
February 8th, 2023
1pm ET / 10am PT
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.
FOA - NEW Brain Aging Pilot Project Award Program 2023
Application Due February 6th, 2023 at 11:59pm CT
More Info Here:
NEW Brain Aging Pilot Project Awards are intended to develop novel research infrastructure and projects that will advance the science of EWB and brain aging in specific areas requiring interdisciplinary partnerships or collaborations. They will serve two primary purposes. First, we seek to expand the quality, quantity, and translational impact of research into the mechanistic relationships between brain structure and function on one hand and EWB in older adults on the other. Second, we intend to engage investigators new to the study of brain aging and EWB – both those who are early in their careers and have yet to define a topic area for their programs of study as well as investigators who have established research programs in other areas that they can productively extend to include NEW Brain Aging topics.
Congratulations to Mia Anthony!
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.
Check back later for updates!
Past Network Events
Presentation by Dr. Dacher Keltner: The Age of Emotion Science: Insights from Computational Approaches and a Case Study of Awe
October 5th, 2022
1pm ET / 10am PT
VIRTUAL, join us on Zoom!
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.
Presentation by Dr. Yi Zuo: Stress effects on cortical circuits: impact, prevention, and rescue
VIRTUAL, find it on our website!
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.
Presentation by Dr. Sarah Garfinkel: Clinical Neuroscience and the Heart-Brain Axis
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.
February 2, 2022
2pm ET
VIRTUAL, join us on Zoom!
Watch Here:
Neuroimaging and Brain Aging Virtual Workshop
December 15th, 2021
11am-5:30pm ET
8am-2:30pm PT
VIRTUAL, join us on Zoom!
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.
View our list of speakers and workshop schedule here:
FOA - NEW Brain Aging Pilot Project Award Program 2022
Application Due December 1st, 2021 at 11:59 CT
More Info Here:
NEW Brain Aging Pilot Project Awards are intended to develop novel research infrastructure and projects that will advance the science of EWB and brain aging in specific areas requiring interdisciplinary partnerships or collaborations. They will serve two primary purposes. First, we seek to expand the quality, quantity, and translational impact of research into the mechanistic relationships between brain structure and function on one hand and EWB in older adults on the other. Second, we intend to engage investigators new to the study of brain aging and EWB – both those who are early in their careers and have yet to define a topic area for their programs of study as well as investigators who have established research programs in other areas that they can productively extend to include NEW Brain Aging topics.