Great Teachers Lecture Series:
"How We Remember, Why We Forget"
WHO: Stuart M. Zola, PhD
Director, Yerkes National Primate Research Center Professor, Psychiatry
and Behavioral Sciences, Emory University Research Career Scientist,
Atlanta V.A. Medical Center
WHAT: Emory's Great Teachers Lecture Series
WHERE: Miller-Ward Alumni House, 815 Houston Mill Road. Free parking.
WHEN: Thursday, Jan. 16, 2003, 7:30 p.m.
CALL: 404/727-6000
Having spent much of his
scientific career studying the brains of human patients and non-human
primates, neuroscientist Stuart M. Zola, PhD, has achieved remarkable
insights into one of the brain’s most essential but elusive functions:
memory. Our memories are more fluid and malleable than we may realize,
and false memories can seem astonishingly real, as Dr. Zola will demonstrate.
But it is actually the loss of the ability to remember, known as amnesia,
that has helped scientists unlock the secrets of memory.
As part of Emory’s Great
Teachers Lecture Series, Dr. Zola will explain how memory is formed,
stored, and retrieved, and how memory function can be damaged or lost
due to injury or illness. He also will discuss different types of memory,
the effects of growth and aging on cognitive development and decline,
and exciting new research programs aimed at discovering more about how
memory problems occur and how they might be treated or prevented.
The lecture will take place
at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 16, at the Emory Miller-Ward Alumni House,
located at 815 Houston Mill Road. It is free, open to the public, and
does not require reservations. Parking is available on site. Call 404-727-6000
for further information.
While at the University of
California, San Diego, Dr. Zola and his colleagues developed an animal
model of human amnesia that conclusively identified a group of interconnected
brain structures critical to memory function. His research has contributed
significantly to our understanding of the memory loss in humans that
results from head trauma and that characterizes progressive diseases
such as Alzheimer’s, as well as less severe memory problems that often
accompany depression, chronic stress, and normal aging.
A part of the Woodruff Health
Sciences Center of Emory University, the Yerkes Center is one of eight
designated National Primate Research Centers (NPRCs) that are supported
by the National Institutes of Health. As the director of the Yerkes
NPRC, Dr. Zola oversees broadly based research programs, funded by $40.2
million in grants, that address health issues such as AIDS, malaria
and other infectious diseases, cocaine addiction, cardiovascular disease,
childhood visual deficits, organ transplantation, and cognitive development
and decline. Scientists at Yerkes also study social behavior in non-human
primates. With over 3,000 non-human primates and 2,500 rodents, Yerkes
serves as a vital resource for collaborative scientists at Emory and
at other research institutions throughout the U.S. and the world.
Before joining Emory in September
2001, Dr. Zola was a professor in the departments of psychiatry and
neurosciences at the University of California, San Diego, and also held
the position of Research Career Scientist at the Veterans Administration
Medical Center in San Diego. He is a member of several scientific and
professional societies, including the Society for Neuroscience and the
National Association for Biomedical Research, and serves on the editorial
advisory boards of the journals Cognitive Brain Research and Behavioral
and Neural Biology. He received his bachelor of arts degree from the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1965 and his master’s (1969)
and doctoral (1973) degrees in neuroscience from Northeastern University
in Boston. |