IN THIS ISSUE
SUMMER COURSE 2020:
- Corona update
- Special lectures
- Registration
-Tuition fees & grants
- Accreditation
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AGENDA
28 JUNE - 03 JUL 2020:
Summer Course, Florence
15 April 2020: Grant application deadline
15 May 2020: Course application deadline
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This is the newsletter of the Summer School on Affective Neuroscience.
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Summer Course on Fear, Anxiety, Obsessions & Trauma 2020
Corona Update:
We are closely monitoring the spread of coronavirus and all its consequences.
At the moment, we are hopeful that the Summer Course can take place in Florence from 28 June to 3 July 2020.
Applications are still welcome; the requests for the tuition fee payment will be postponed until April.
We will continue to watch any developments related to the virus outbreak and the potential impact on the course.
We will update this information as the course approaches.
Thank you for your understanding and support!
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Special Lectures during the Summer Course:
In this newsletter we present the abstracts of our Special Lectures Series during the upcoming Summer Course on Fear, Anxiety, Obsessions & Trauma.
Each Summer Course, we present this series of guest lectures by esteemed scientists from all over the world. They broaden the participant's horizon, highlight important developments and put current concepts in a new perspective.
Affective psychopathology
(Prof. Elisabeth Binder)
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Abstract:
Early adverse exposures, including maternal stress during pregnancy, are thought to result in long-lasting consequences on neural circuit function and stress hormone regulation and ultimately in an increased risk for psychiatric but also medical disorders later in life. A focus will be on exposure to stress hormones, i.e glucocorticoids (GCs), including in utero. These have been shown to alter gene expression pattern and to induce long-lasting epigenetic changes in specific loci through binding of the glucocorticoid receptor (GR) to glucocorticoid responsive elements (GREs).
The talk will first highlight data from a human hippocampal cell line that identify long lasting changes in DNA methylation in response to GCs. These lasting epigenetic changes are located in brain development- and disease-relevant gene enhancer regions and lead to increased transcriptional sensitivity to future stress exposure, suggesting that prenatal GC exposure could prime the transcriptional response to subsequent stress exposure. How these effects maybe moderated by genetic variants will be discussed using omics data from perinatal tissue from large, longitudinal cohorts with environmental measures taken across pregnancy. Data from human brain organoids and single cell sequencing will then delineate that specific nervous system cell subtypes show differential sensitivity to early GC exposure during brain development. Transcripts moderated by GC exposure are significantly enriched among genes, that show associations with behavioral traits in large GWAS or are rare variants associated with neurodevelopmental disorders. Overall, the presentation will outline how stress-exposure can have lasting effects on cell and tissue function and how this relates to risk or resilience to stress-related disorders in the context of common genetic variation.
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Elisabeth Binder has studied Medicine at the University of Vienna, Austria and Neuroscience at Emory University in Atlanta, GA, USA. Following a postdoctoral training at the Max-Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, Germany, she returned to Emory University as an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Human Genetics. In 2007, she was appointed as research group leader at the Max-Planck Institute of Psychiatry within the Minerva Program of the Max-Planck Society.
Since August 2013, Elisabeth Binder is the director of the Department of Translational Research in Psychiatry at the Max-Planck Institute of Psychiatry. She also holds an appointment as Full Professor in the Dept. of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory University School of Medicine. Her main research interests are the identification of molecular moderators of the response to environmental factors, with a focus on early trauma and gene x environment interactions. She studies how such factors influence trajectories to psychiatric disease or well-being to ultimately use this information for novel prevention and treatment strategies.
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From training the brain to be social: lessons to be learnt from autism
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Having an understanding of others’ mental states such as emotions and thoughts is an important predictor for successful social interactions. In this presentation I will describe different ways by which we arrive at judgments about others’ minds with an emphasis on body-based mechanisms such as synchronized movement and imitation. I will furthermore seek to shed some light on questions concerning the neuronal basis for social cognition and its trainability. Studies will be presented that were conducted over the past years focusing on social cognition in individuals with autism spectrum conditions. Given that those psychiatric conditions involve core, and sometimes selective, deficits in social cognition, they represent valuable models for understanding behavioral correlates and brain underpinnings of social cognition also in typical development.
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Isabel Dziobek’s interests and works lie in the field of social cognition as well as social cognitive and affective neuroscience, focusing on empathy, emotion processing, and mindreading processes. She has been conducting studies in clinical populations involving social dysfunction such as autism and borderline personality disorder. As an experimental psychologist and psychotherapist (CBT) she is interested in both, understanding the mechanisms of (dis)order in social information processing and in the development of treatment options for those with respective impairments. The methods that she uses encompass movement and video-based tests and trainings of social cognition, structural and functional MRI, eye tracking, and peripheral physiology measures such as skin conductance and heart rate assessments.
Dr. Dziobek got her diploma in Psychology from Ruhr-Universität Bochum and continued to do a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience at the New York University School of Medicine from 2001-2005, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. From 2009-2014 she headed the junior research group “Understanding Interaffectivity” at Freie Universit Berlin and since 2014 she has been Professor at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She has published more than 100 scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals, has conducted numerous multicenter third-party funded studies and received several awards for her work, among others the prestigious Charlotte and Karl-Bühler Price of the German Society for Pychology in 2014.
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Neurobiology of fear and trauma memory
(Prof. Erno Hermans) |
The neurobiology of fear and trauma memory has been the subject of intense research efforts for many years. A large body of experimental work in rodents has shown that while fear learning depends primarily on basolateral amygdala, unlearning fears critically involves infralimbic projections to basolateral amygdala. Human neuroimaging findings are to some extent consistent with these findings, but meta-analyses show involvement of a larger networks of regions. In this lecture, I will explain how regions involved in fear learning are part of several distinct large-scale networks, which often operate reciprocally, and in which mnemonically relevant activity persists beyond learning. Finally, I will explain how insights into these dynamics can be harnessed to enhance safety learning.
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Erno Hermans' research group conducts human research at the interface of basic neuroscience and psychiatry, with a focus on understanding how exposure to stressors results in short-term and long-term (mal)adaptation. He combines human functional neuroimaging with endocrine measures, autonomic psychophysiology, pharmacological manipulations, genetics, and experimental behavioral paradigms, in both healthy volunteers and patients, with the ultimate goal to advance understanding, treatment, and prevention of stress-related psychopathology. He currently holds a position as Associate Professor at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour and Radboud university medical center. He was awarded an ERC Consolidator grant for a project entitled STRESNET: Stress resilience and network feedback training. This project aims to develop new strategies to prevent negative consequences of stress exposure. He is also a collaborator and work package leader on a European Horizon 2020 consortium project named DynaMORE: Dynamic Modeling of Resilience, which aims to develop computer models to predict and promote mental well-being.
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Registration for the Summer Course
Early applications: 15 April 2019
Final applications deadline: 15 May 2019
The Summer Course on Anxiety aims at an in-depth analysis of the latest developments in the field of anxious pathology, including phenomena that are related to anxiety and fear such as trauma, obsessions and compulsions. In addition to the introductory lectures the course includes guest lectures to broaden the horizon of our students beyond our regular teaching programme. You will find more info about the guest lecturer this year below.
It is aimed at young scientists and clinicians with a background in psychology, medicine, neuroscience, behavioural sciences, or a related discipline, who want to enhance their expertise in affective disorders.
The morning sessions are dedicated to the PBL-sessions: workshops during which the students work in small groups on assignments and discussion topics related to the theme of the day. The assignments contain elements of fundamental neuroscience as well as clinical applications. Each group will summarize their results in a presentation at the plenary session on Friday.
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Tuition fees and grants 2020
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The tuition fee for the next Summer Course is published on the website. The tuition fee includes half board accomodation (shared double room, breakfast, lunch, coffee breaks).
Note that the tuition fee can only be paid by bank transfer or online.
This year, grants/stipend will be awarded by the Fens & IBRO-PERC, and the EACIC (see below). Applications are welcome via the website.
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This year FENS and IBRO-PERC provide 4 stipends for master and/or PhD students interested in attending this year's course. Through these stipends FENS and IBRO-PERC aim to encourage and promote international experience of students; hence, students that are currently residing or studying in the Netherlands and Italy are not eligible for a FENS and IBRO-PERC stipend for this course.
More information will follow soon.
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One Spinoza grant of €1000 will be awarded. This grant is made available by EACIC. Send in your application before 15 April 2020.
This grant is intended for highly motivated young scientists with limited resources, who receive no other financial support.
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Grant application deadline: 15 April |
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The European Accreditation Committee in CNS has designated this scientific event each year with an average of 32 CME credits.
Those interested in obtaining these CME credits will be required to fill in a special online feedback rating from on the EACIC website: www.eacic.eu.
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EACIC credits can be transferred into accreditation points for the Dutch psychiatrists by the NVvP.
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http://affect-neuroscience.org
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