The basal ganglia and the decision to act

Ann M. Graybiel is an institute professor at the Massachusetts Institute of technology, where she and her laboratory are actively investigating neural circuits related to the basal ganglia and to a range of neurologic and neuropsychiatric disorders. Her work is centered on understanding the functions of circuits leading from mood-related parts of the frontal neocortex through the striatum to the dopamine-containing neurons of the midbrain. This work took its origin in her discovery of neurochemically distinct compartments in the striatum, which she named ‘striosomes’. These are now known to provide all or nearly all striatal input to the dopamine-containing neurons of the midbrain. These circuits strongly bias decision-making made under motivationally challenging conditions, as though inducing optimistic or pessimistic state changes. They can strongly modulate responses to stress and levels of engagement across age, and levels of reinforcement-based learning. Her group is now harnessing molecular and genetic markers in functional work of these and related circuits of the striatal matrix, with the goal of contributing to clinical medicine as well as to fundamental understanding of the brain.

John F. Cryan (Chair of the Scientific Programme Committee 35th, 36th and 37th ECNP congress) is Professor & Chair, Dept. of Anatomy & Neuroscience, University College Cork. He is also a Principal Investigator in the APC Microbiome Institute. He received a B.Sc. (Hons) and PhD from the National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland. He was a visiting fellow at the Dept Psychiatry, University of Melbourne, Australia, which was followed by postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA and The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California. He spent four years at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research in Basel Switzerland, as a LabHead, Behavioural Pharmacology prior to joining UCC in 2005. Prof. Cryan's current research is focused on understanding the interaction between brain, gut & microbiome and how it applies to stress, psychiatric and immune-related disorders at key time-windows across the lifespan. Prof. Cryan has published over 650 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and has a H-index of 150 (Google Scholar). He is a Senior Editor of Neuropharmacology and of Nutritional Neuroscience. He is on the editorial board of a further 15 journals. He has edited three books and is co-author of the bestselling “The Psychobiotic Revolution: Mood, Food, and the New Science of the Gut-Brain Connection” (National Geographic Press, 2017). He has received numerous awards including UCC Researcher of the Year in 2012, the University of Utrecht Award for Excellence in Pharmaceutical Research in 2013, UCC Research Communicator of the Year 2017, and being named on the Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher list in 2014 and Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher list in 2017, 2018 & 2019. He was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2017. He also received a Research Mentor Award from the American Gastroenterology Association and the Tom Connor Distinguished Scientist Award from Neuroscience Ireland in 2017 and was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Antwerp, Belgium in 2018. He was a TEDMED speaker in Washington in 2014 and is Past-President of the European Behavioural Pharmacology Society. Prof. Cryan's current research interests include the neurobiological basis of stress-related neuropsychiatric disorders including depression, anxiety and drug dependence. Moreover, his group is also focused on understanding the interaction between brain, gut & microbiome and how it applies to stress and immune-related disorders, including irritable bowel syndrome and obesity and neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism. He is also interested in applying novel approaches to facilitate drug/siRNA delivery to the brain in vivo.