Professor Joy Hirsch of Columbia University, an internationally recognized expert on the mysteries of brain circuitry, will give the 2009 George Gamow Memorial Lecture at the University of Colorado at Boulder on April 2.
Free and open to the public, the lecture titled "Dialogues Within the Specialized Brain" will be held at 7:30 p.m. in Macky Auditorium on the CU-Boulder campus. The Gamow lecture series brings renowned scientists to campus to present their research findings to general audiences.
Hirsch, a professor of functional neuroradiology, neuroscience and psychology, focuses her research on the brain circuitry that underlies cognition, perception and action. She studies conscious and subconscious neural processes that mediate emotions and cognition in healthy individuals and in patients with psychiatric, neurological and developmental disorders.
Her pioneering research on language has shown that the mechanisms involved in acquiring a second language occur in a part of the brain separate from parts used in learning a primary language. Hirsch and her group also have conducted studies of obesity and eating disorders, autism, vision and interbrain communication.
Hirsch is director of the Program for Imaging and Cognitive Sciences, or PICS, at Columbia, a core imaging facility to study the brain and mind. The center applies advanced imaging technologies that include functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to observe both the structures of the brain and the internal connections and to investigate fundamental processes that underlie brain-driven functions.
"Functional imaging is really a bridge between the brain and the mind that neuroscientists have dreamed of," said Hirsch. "It has revolutionized and revitalized neuroscience."
Hirsch received her doctorate in psychology from Columbia. Before joining the Columbia faculty, she was a professor at the Yale University School of Medicine in the neuroscience program and the ophthalmology and visual sciences department. She founded the first fMRI laboratory at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City prior to being recruited to Columbia as director of the mind and brain-imaging program.
The George Gamow Memorial Lectures honor the late Russian-born physicist who joined the CU-Boulder physics department in 1956. Gamow is best known for his part in developing the big-bang theory of the universe. The lecture series started in 1971 and is funded by an endowment left by his wife, Barbara Gamow.
There will be a public reception after the lecture at the CU Heritage Center on the third floor of Old Main. For more information about the lecture, call 303-492-1440 or visit . For more information on Hirsh's research visit .