The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Monday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Leslie Vosshall, Ph.D., Robin Chemers Neustein Professor and head, Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior, The Rockefeller University; vice president and chief scientific officer, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Speaker bio(s)

One of the most fascinating observations in sensory neuroscience is that the brain can adapt to the loss of one sense by increasing the sensitivity of another sense. Well-described examples in humans include increases in auditory and tactile perception in blind individuals and increases in visual and tactile perception in deaf individuals. The underlying mechanisms, where they have been studied, typically involve functional reorganization of primary sensory cortex with new innervation of the compensatory sense into brain areas formerly occupied by the lost sense. The Vosshall Lab has discovered an unexpected mechanism of long-range sensory compensation in the mosquito. Loss of an olfactory pathway causes a dramatic increase in a thermosensory pathway. What makes this fascinating is that the compensation occurs across sensory organs located on completely different body parts. These results show that mosquitoes have robust mechanisms to maintain maximum sensitivity to humans if they lose a key sensory modality.

Leslie B. Vosshall received her undergraduate degree in biochemistry from Columbia University and her Ph.D. from Rockefeller, where she was a member of Michael W. Young’s lab. She conducted postdoctoral work with Richard Axel at Columbia before joining Rockefeller’s faculty in 2000. From 2016 to 2021 she also directed Rockefeller’s Kavli Neural Systems Institute. Vosshall was an HHMI investigator from 2008 to 2022. That year she became HHMI vice president and chief scientific officer.

Vosshall has received numerous honors, including a Dickson Prize in Medicine, a Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize, a W. Alden Spencer Award, a Pradel Research Award, a Gill Young Investigator Award, a Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists, and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Philosophical Society.

MLS lectures are only open to the RU community and will be taking place in Carson Family Auditorium and virtually via Zoom. Virtual participants are required to log in with their RU Zoom account and use their RU email address and password for authentication. We recommend signing out of VPN prior to logging in to the lecture. Please do not share the link or post on social media.

Open to

Campus Only