بورسیه دکتری کامپیوتر، فناوری اطلاعات، زیست شناسی در بلژیک

بورسیه دکتری کامپیوتر، فناوری اطلاعات، زیست شناسی، بیوشیمی، پزشکی، علوم اعصاب، فیزیک در بلژیک

Orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and amygdala (AMY) are crucial nodes in the neural circuits underlying social cognition, emotional learning, and attention. These reciprocally connected structures have been implicated in several psychiatric disorders, and dysfunctional “top-down” OFC-AMY, and “bottom-up” AMY-OFC pathways have both been speculated underlie symptoms like emotional dysregulation, abnormal sociality, and abnormal motivations. While it is impossible to prove causal roles for either circuit in humans at present, gene transfer-based methods for controlling in vivo circuit activity in rodents are reaching maturity, and preliminary reports show these methods are well-tolerated and functional in non-human primates as well. This project involves investigating both the behavioral and functional consequences of reversibly inhibiting AMY-OFC projections, using a state-of-the art pharmacogenetic approach, in combination with functional MRI in the awake rhesus monkey.