Chair: Dr Laurence Hunt

Abstract: Emotions and social interactions colour our lives and shape our behaviours. Using animal models and engineered manipulations, we aim to understand how social and emotional behaviours are encoded in the brain, focusing on the neural circuits underlying dominance hierarchy and depression. This lecture will highlight recent discoveries on the interplay between winning history and prefrontal circuit activities; the impact of social status loss on depression; and, finally, how ketamine tames depression by blocking burst firing in the brain’s anti-reward centre, and how glia-neuron interaction plays a surprising role in this process. I will also present our recent work on the mechanism underlying the sustained antidepressant activity of ketamine and its brain region specificity.