"Action selection and action encoding during anxiety"
"The prefrontal cortex (PFC) has been dubbed the “doer cortex” with a primary role of representing and selecting purposeful actions. We have been interested in the encoding of goal-directed actions per se by PFC neurons and how it is affected by anxiety. The focus on anxiety stems from the fact that its relevance to mental health extends well beyond anxiety disorders. Critically, anxiety is a debilitating symptom of most psychiatric disorders including PTSD, major depression, autism, schizophrenia and addiction. Anxiety is often studied as a stand-alone construct in laboratory animals that focuses on fear responses. But in the context of coping with real-life anxiety, its negative impacts extend beyond aversive feelings to involve disruptions in ongoing goal-directed behaviors and cognitive functioning. I will present data from two distinct models of anxiety that allowed us to perform ensemble and local field potential recordings during reward-guided goal-directed behaviors."
Bita Moghaddam is Chair of the Department of Behavioral Neuroscience and Ruth Matarazzo Professor at OHSU. She received a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Kansas and postdoctoral training in pharmacology at Yale University. She joined the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University in 1990 where she quickly rose to the rank of full professor. In 2003 she moved to the University of Pittsburgh as professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry. She joined OHSU in 2017. Her research focuses on understanding the neuronal basis of complex behaviors that are critical to mental health, and is distinguished by the substantial impact on the field.
