Visit of Dr. D. Caroline Blanchard to the Department of Anatomy February/May 2016

Abstract

Dr. Caroline Blanchard's visit to our lab will be very helpful to develop ongoing projects in our lab and new proposals to understand the neural basis of defensive aggression. Among the ongoing projects in our laboratory, Dr. Caroline Blanchard will be working in two specific projects, which are part of our FAPESP research grant Neural Basis of Fear and Aggression (Project # 2014/05432-9). In the first project, we will explore how a cortical network processing predator threats would be involved in the acquisition/expression of contextual fear responses. To this end, Dr. Caroline Blanchard's expertise on behavioral analysis will be essential to validate our behavioral data. Moreover, Dr. Caroline Blanchard will also train our students to analyze the full spectrum of anti-predatory responses. In the second project, we shall explore the neural basis of risk assessment. Dr. Caroline Blanchard is a leading researcher in this field, and her expertise will be critical to provide a careful analysis of the behavioral data as well as to plan putative neural targets to explore. In addition, we are planning pilot experiments to investigate defensive aggression, and the idea is to elaborate a research plan involving Dr Caroline Blanchard and Dr Andrew Gundlach from University of Melbourne. Finally, in this visit, Dr. Caroline Blachard will give seminars on ethological analysis of defensive behavior in the graduate course Advances in Morphofunctional Sciences BMA 5900. (AU)