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SUMMARY:Loren Frank\, PhD – James L. McGaugh Distinguished Seminar Series
DESCRIPTION:McGaugh Distinguished Seminar Series\n\n\n\nTuesday\, October 20th\, 2026 at 11:00am\n\n\n\nThe seminar will be In-Person.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLoren Frank\, PhD\n\n\n\nInvestigator\, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Professor\, Departments of Physiology and Psychiatry\, UCSF\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThinking and Doing \n\n\n\nAbstract: \n\n\n\nThe brain has the remarkable ability to self-generate meaningful and distributed activity patterns (“thoughts”). Thoughts make it possible to simulate possible futures and alternative pasts\, and to use those simulations to inform choices. Here we focus on two key features of thoughts. First\, thoughts can be controlled: subjects can typically decide what to think about and then generate related mental representations. Second\, thoughts are behaviorally accessible: subjects can act based on their representational content. The neural activity patterns that underlie thoughts are poorly understood\, but we do know that there are specific activity patterns in the brain that are consistent with mental simulations. These include non-local spatial representations in the hippocampus that are consistent with possible futures and alternative pasts. Whether these representations are controllable and accessible remains unclear. We therefore developed two tasks that where we delivered real-time feedback contingent on the decoded content of non-local hippocampal representations. These tasks allowed us to determine 1) whether animals can control the content of non-local hippocampal representations and 2) whether they can access that content to guide an upcoming choice. If you are interested in knowing what we found\, please come to the talk. \n\n\n\nBio: \n\n\n\nLoren Frank is Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and a Professor in the Department of Physiology at the University of California\, San Francisco (UCSF). He received his B.A. in Psychology and Cognitive studies from Carleton College\, his Ph.D. in Systems Neuroscience and Computation from M.I.T. and did post-doctoral research at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University. His laboratory uses a combination of techniques to study the neural bases of learning\, memory and decision-making. In particular\, his work focuses on the hippocampus and related structures\, brain areas critical for forming and retrieving memories for the events of daily life. He also works in close collaboration with colleagues from multiple institutions to develop new technologies to understand how the brain works and how to fix it when it is not working properly. These technologies include flexible polymer electrodes that make it possible to record from large numbers of neurons for months at a time and real-time feedback systems that enable manipulations of specific patterns of brain activity. Dr. Frank has received numerous awards for his scientific discoveries and his mentoring\, including fellowships from the Sloan\, McKnight and Merck Foundations as well as the Society for Neuroscience Young Investigator Award\, the University of Indiana Gill Young Investigator Award\, the UCSF Faculty Mentoring Award\, and the College Mentors for Kids Inspire Award.
URL:https://neurobiology.uci.edu/event/loren-frank-phd-james-l-mcgaugh-distinguished-seminar-series/
LOCATION:Herklotz Conference Room\, 300 Qureshey Research Lab\, Irvine\, California\, 92697-3800\, United States
CATEGORIES:James L. McGaugh Distinguished Seminar
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20270518T110000
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DTSTAMP:20260917T205135Z
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UID:7826-1810638000-1810641600@neurobiology.uci.edu
SUMMARY:Yavin Shaham\, PhD – James L. McGaugh Distinguished Seminar Series
DESCRIPTION:McGaugh Distinguished Seminar Series\n\n\n\n\nTuesday\, May 18th\, 2027 at 11:00am\n\n\n\nThe seminar will be In-Person.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\nYavin Shaham\, PhD\n\n\n\nBranch Chief & Senior Investigator\, Intramural Research Program\, NIDA-NIH\, Baltimore\, MD\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRats can make good choices: Effect of alternative food and social rewards on drug use and relapse in rat models of addiction \n\n\n\nAbstract: \n\n\n\nIn previous studies\, we and others used a rat model of drug relapse and craving to demonstrate time-dependent increases in drug seeking following experimenter-imposed (forced) abstinence in the homecage—a phenomenon we termed incubation of drug craving (Grimm et al.\, Nature\, 2001). More recently\, we developed a rat model to study drug craving and relapse following extended periods of voluntary abstinence in the drug-associated environment. Voluntary abstinence is achieved through a mutually exclusive discrete-choice procedure\, in which male and female rats with a history of intravenous opioid or psychostimulant self-administration choose daily between palatable food or social interaction with a peer versus the addictive drug. We propose that these voluntary abstinence models reflect key elements of operant-based human treatments\, such as contingency management (where alternative rewards are monetary vouchers) and the community reinforcement approach (where positive social interactions serve as reinforcement). In this lecture\, I will introduce the voluntary abstinence models and present behavioral and neural circuit analyses of drug craving and relapse after the removal of the food or social rewards. \n\n\n\nBio: \n\n\n\nYavin Shaham earned his B.S. and M.A. from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and his Ph.D. from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda\, MD. He completed postdoctoral training at Concordia University in Montreal under the mentorship of Dr. Jane Stewart. Before joining the NIDA Intramural Research Program (IRP)\, he was an investigator at the Addiction Research Center in Toronto. He is currently a tenured Branch Chief and Senior Investigator at NIDA. Shaham’s major awards include the Society for Neuroscience’s Jacob Waletzky Award for innovative research in drug and alcohol addiction (2006)\, the NARSAD Distinguished Investigator Grant Award (2016)\, the NIDA-IRP Investigator Mentoring Award (2016)\, the European Behavioral Pharmacology Society (EBPS) Distinguished Achievement Award (2017)\, the NIH Director’s Award of Merit (2020)\, and the NIH Ruth Kirschstein Mentoring Award (2022). In 2023\, he was invited to present his research at a Nobel symposium on the “Social Brain.” Shaham has published over 250 empirical papers\, reviews\, and commentaries\, with more than 44\,500 citations and an h-index of 115 (Google Scholar). In 2018\, Shaham was named by The Web of Science as a “Highly Cited Researcher” (top 1%). From 2008 to 2018\, he served as a Reviewing and Senior Editor for The Journal of Neuroscience. Currently\, he is a Reviewing Editor for Neuropsychopharmacology and an Advisory Board Member for eNeuro. He also serves on the editorial boards of Biological Psychiatry\, Psychopharmacology\, Behavioural Pharmacology\, and Addiction Biology. Additionally\, Shaham was the President of EBPS from 2021 to 2023. His research focuses on the mechanisms of relapse to opioid and psychostimulant seeking\, using rat models developed in his lab.
URL:https://neurobiology.uci.edu/event/yavin-shaham-mcgaugh-distinguished-seminar-series/
LOCATION:Herklotz Conference Room\, 300 Qureshey Research Lab\, Irvine\, California\, 92697-3800\, United States
CATEGORIES:James L. McGaugh Distinguished Seminar
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