Building a social brain: Cells, circuits and behavior across the lifespan

Disrupted social behavior is a fundamental indicator of compromised mental health, such as anxiety and depression, and serves as an early diagnostic marker for disorders that can develop later in life. However, our understanding of how the neural circuits for social behavior develop and how environmental disturbances at various developmental stages affect infant behavior is limited. Through my research with rats, I have established a foundation for identifying specific neuroanatomical circuits in infants that produce age-appropriate social behavior and how these systems may change in response to adversity. Overall, these studies have helped generate technical and conceptual advances in our understanding of social development and early life stress. These studies have employed multiple levels of analysis and functional brain dissection to identify novel targets of early social stress and measure how the infant brain responds to social information in typical and perturbed development.