Abstract:
As a child I grew up in one of the few green lungs on the outskirts of Bombay, and so witnessed many a fox, owl, vulture, snake and on one strikingly memorable occasion a panther. I was fascinated by the idea that the brain controlled the highly varied responses to these encounters - from simple enjoyment to paralytic fear. Those early experiences shaped my interest in Neuroscience, and resulted in a long-lasting fascination in understanding neurocircuits that modulate emotion. As a graduate student and postdoctoral fellow working on understanding the molecular mechanisms that underlie the pathogenesis of mood disorders, I was immensely lucky to have had terrific advisors who have extended their mentorship well into the years of my establishing an independent lab. I was also inching my way home from the US via Sweden and finally England, which also served as an introduction to the distinctive ways of running a lab and achieving a work-life balance.
The focus of my lab has ended up centred on two predominant questions – (1) How does life experience, in particular adverse early life history, evoke persistent changes in behavior? and (2) How do pharmacological agents that modulate mood bring about a change in behavior? These are fundamental questions that have attracted many a neurobiologist to take a crack at solving them, so setting up a lab has also involved devising strategies to capitalize on some of the unique advantages of being in India. One such advantage we have chosen to capitalize on is to address the influence of early life experience across a life-span, finding along the way that the behavioral, molecular and epigenetic changes evoked by life experience vary quite dramatically depending on the time-point at which you examine them. A few of the successes we have had as a lab have been the result of premeditated plans, but more have come our way because of the intuition or dogged determination of talented graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, and as a result of sheer blind luck. I would like to share with you some of the key experiences that have shaped both the scientific output and the character of the lab.
Bio:
Vidita Vaidya is an Indian neuroscientist and Professor at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. She was a former Senior Research Fellow of the Wellcome Trust and a former associate of the Indian Academy of Sciences. Her primary areas of research are neuroscience and molecular psychiatry. Vidita received her undergraduate degree from St. Xavier's College, Mumbai in Life Sciences and Biochemistry. She obtained her doctoral degree in Neuroscience at Yale University in. Her postdoctoral work was done at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and at the University of Oxford in UK. Other than various awards, she has also received Shantiswarup Bhatnagar in 2015. She is a fellow if Indian National Science Academy.
This seminar is compulsory for students registered for course CL 702 or CL 704.