NBB Seminar Series

Tuesday, October 28th, 2025 at 11:00am

The seminar will be In-Person.

Zoe R. Donaldson, Ph.D.

Professor of Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology and Psychology & Neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder

“Neurobiology of bond formation and maintenance”

Abstract:

During the formation of a social bond, information from social interaction is transformed into attachment. In the first part of this talk, I will focus on how social information is organized at multiple scales—from stable encoding in individual neurons to coordinated ensembles—during bond formation. These studies, which focus on the nucleus accumbens, highlight a pivotal role for calcium permeable AMPA receptors and fast spiking interneurons. As relationships mature, partners share common goals, improve their ability to work together, and experience coordinated emotions. In the second part of this talk, I will highlight work using single cell sequencing that revealed accumbal transcriptional concordance between partners, a transcriptional signature associated with pairwise differences in behavior. Together, this work delineates how social relationships change the brain beginning with their initial encoding mechanisms and then establishing a framework that facilitates connectedness and may help pairs effectively navigate the world together.

Bio:

Dr. Zoe Donaldson is a Professor 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. Her lab studies monogamous prairie voles. Unlike rats and mice, these rodents forms lifelong pair bonds between mates akin to human romantic partnerships. By examining the neurobiology underlying these bonds and what happens when they are lost, she hopes to identify novel treatments for psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders.