QBI Neuroscience Seminar: 'Understanding the development of emotional memory to treat anxiety and addiction '

Event Details

Date:

Wednesday, 05 July 2017 - Wednesday, 05 July 2017

Time:

11:00 am - 12:00 pm

Room:

QBI Level 7 Auditorium

UQ Location:

Queensland Brain Institute (St Lucia)

URL:

http://www.qbi.uq.edu.au/neuroscience-seminars

Event category(s):

Full Description:: Dr Jeehyun Kim
Lab Head, Developmental Psycho-biology Laboratory –Behavioural Neuroscience, The Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, Parkville VIC 3052
Title: 'Understanding the development of emotional memory to treat anxiety and addiction'
Abstract:
My vision is to discover the role of memory across the lifetime in mental disorders, namely anxiety and substance abuse. I believe the key to finding effective treatments lies in how we remember and forget emotionally significant events during our development. This is because the vast majority of anxiety disorders and substance abuse have an onset during childhood or adolescence. We use various rodent models that closely resemble human behaviours, and manipulate them using different drugs, viruses, and cognitive-behavioural approaches to find potential therapeutics. We discovered that behavioural training that normally reduces anxiety and drug seeking in adult rodents are not effective during adolescence. We have translated some of our findings in humans and we are now investigating how to reverse such impairments by manipulating the neuropharmacological basis of adolescent vulnerability in anxiety and addiction.