Jean & Bill Booziotis Distinguished Lecture

5500 Caruth Haven Lane,Dallas TX 75225

27 October, 2022

Description

The Center for Vital Longevity is proud to have R. Alison Adcock, MD, PhD as guest speaker for this year's Jean & Bill Booziotis Distinguished Lecture Series. Dr. Adcock is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Neurobiology, and Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke University, where she is also Interim Director of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, Member of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and Faculty Network Member of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, and Affiliate of the Center for Brain Imaging and Analysis. About Dr. Adcock: Dr. Adcock is Director of the Duke Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and Interim Director of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. Her laboratory works to understand brain states conducive to learning and how to engage them, offering new tools for individual and societal flourishing. The same neurotransmitter systems that fine tune our memories take multifaceted mental images that embody our hopes and fears and distill them into simple signals; this capability implies that we can regulate our own brain chemistry using imagination. Using fMRI, Dr. Adcock’s laboratory demonstrated that people can indeed learn to activate such small nuclei – specifically, those that produce most of the brain’s dopamine -- using nothing but mental imagery. Like the discovery that runners can trigger endorphin release with physical activity, the self-regulation of neurochemistry with mental activity suggests many methods for changing brain function in response to the current moment. Dr. Adcock’s discovery science aims to use these findings to better understand memory mechanisms and neurotransmitter systems. Her translational work aims to help define ways to tune a learners’ brain state, matching it precisely to a specific challenge. Dr. Adcock graduated from Emory University and received her PhD in Neurobiology and MD from Yale University. She completed psychiatric residency training at Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute at the University of California San Francisco, and postdoctoral research connecting UCSF, the San Francisco VA, and Stanford, before joining Duke as faculty. Her work has been funded by NIDA, NIMH, NSF, the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, and Alfred P. Sloan and Klingenstein Fellowships in the Neurosciences, and has been recognized by the National Academies of Science Kavli Fellowship, National Academy of Sciences Seymour Benzer Lectureship, and the Applied Behavioral Analysis Institute's BF Skinner Lectureship. About the event: This event is part of the Center for Vital Longevity’s Booziotis Lecture Series, made possible by the late Bill Booziotis, former president of Booziotis and Company Architects and Center for Vital Longevity Advisory Council Member. Bill Booziotis and his wife, Jean, established the series to bring the Center’s work, focused on understanding the science of the aging mind, to the public.