I am pleased to invite you to attend the MiNDS Colloquium TODAY Thursday April 18th at 3:00 in HSC 4E20. Bring your coffee cup for coffee and cookies before the talk at 2:45.

Dr Derek van der Kooy is a professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto.

Dr van der Kooy's lab works on various stem cell biology and developmental biology research projects, as well as genes important for learning and memory in worms and the neurobiology of motivation in rodents. The lab has helped to characterize the properties and molecular control of adult and embryonic brain neural stem cells, and in collaboration with the lab of Sam Weiss, first localized adult mammalian neural stem cells to the ventricular lining of the brain. The lab now works on stem cells in organisms from Drosophila to humans. Of note, Derek's lab produced the first report of stem cells in the adult mammalian eye, published in 2000 in Science.

Pleasure centers in the brain were discovered by Olds and Milner at McGill in the 1950s, when they found that animals would learn responses to electrically stimulate parts of their own brains. The talk today will review the progress over the past 60 years in defining the regions of the brain that underlie motivational processes. Dr van der Kooy will discuss the nature and resolution of the criticisms that have been made of each word in the "pleasure centers in the brain" phrase.  

 

We look forward to seeing you all at the talk today.

 

Regards

 

Kathy

 

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Kathryn M Murphy PhD

Professor and Director MiNDS Graduate Program

Dept of Psychology Neuroscience & Behaviour

McMaster University

1280 Main St W 

Hamilton ON L8S 4K1