Graduate students and postdocs are encouraged to join the speaker for lunch after the seminar. To sign up for a spot, please email: jmarcus@upenn.edu 

Constantina Theofanopoulou
Herbert and Nell Singer Research Assistant Professor
Rockefeller University

Neurobiology of social communication: from speech to dance

Dr. Theofanopoulou’s overall goal is to dissect the neural circuits of complex sensory motor behaviors that serve social communication, essentially, speech and dance, and to identify possible therapies for disorders that include deficits in these behaviors (e.g., Autism Spectrum Disorders and Parkinson’s Disease). In her lecture, she is going to discuss her work on the role of the social motivation circuitry feeding into the vocal learning pathways and will go through her findings in zebra finches, Bengalese finches, white rumped munias, and humans, that indicated a role of the neurohormone oxytocin in vocal production. She will also explain the genomic tools she developed to translate her oxytocin findings across vertebrates. Sifting gears to her present and future studies, Dr. Theofanopoulou will also introduce her projects and preliminary findings in a series of studies in humans aiming at deciphering possible similarities between speech and dance, ranging from the level of the brain pathways involved (via fMRI and EEG), the genes underlying them (via single nucleus RNA-sequencing and genome sequencing), to clinical applications, using dance as a treatment for speech deficits.

A pizza lunch will be served.