CNH Monthly Roundtable Talk (Jul) by A/Prof Jee Hyun Kim
Talk details:
Inhibition of memory and the dopaminergic system: collaborations to boost your research
Memory is the past that becomes a part of oneself. My vision is to understand the role of memory across the lifetime in mental disorders. I believe the key to finding effective treatments lies in how we remember and forget emotionally significant events during our development. We use different translational approaches in rodents and humans to find potential therapeutics. Dopamine appears to be a key neurotransmitter, with changes in the expression of its receptors throughout life providing important clues in understanding age- and sex-specific inhibition of memory. This presentation will also describe the importance of collaborations, with the example of the Human Brain Project voucher project DOPAMAP (Bjerke et al. 2022 Scientific Data doi.10.1038/s41597-022-01268-8) that was highly successful to produce a public online collection of microscopic images of dopamine receptor 1 or 2 expressing cells across the forebrain of male and female mice. This has led to the formation of an international consortium to discover the mechanistic role of dopamine receptors in stress-induced changes in memory inhibition during adolescence.
Speaker bio:
Associate Professor Jee Hyun Kim is the Head of Molecular Psychiatry Laboratory at Deakin University, School of Medicine. After obtaining her PhD from the University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia), Jee received postdoctoral training at University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, USA) before her appointment at the University of Melbourne in 2011. Jee joined Deakin University in 2020. Jee studies the neurobiology of memory and relevant mental disorders across development in rodents and humans. She strongly believes in open science and collaborations to actively combat the replication crisis in science. She has been leading DOPAMAP with the European Union’s Human Brain Project (https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/en/about/project-structure/partnering-projects/dopamap/). Jee has won numerous national and international awards for her ground-breaking work (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jee_Hyun_Kim). Jee has 99 publications, for which she is the corresponding author to >50. Jee is an active science communicator, with her TEDxMelbourne talk reaching >800,000 views (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_t9O5MgisM).