Description:

The Department of Neuroscience welcomes Dr. Sam A. Golden, Assistant Professor, with the University of Washington to the 2021/2022 seminar series.

Abstract

Aggression is an ethologically complex behavior with equally complex underlying mechanisms. Here, I present data on one form of aggression, appetitive or rewarding aggression,  and the behavioral, cellular and system-level mechanisms guiding this behavior. First, I will present one way in which appetative aggression is modeled in mice, and extend aggression motivation to the concept of compulsive aggression seeking and relapse.  I will then briefly highlight recent advances in computer vision and machine learning for automated scoring of aggressive behavior, the role of specific cell-types in controlling aggression reward, and close with preliminary data on the whole brain aggression reward functional connectome using light sheet fluorescent microscopy