Life Experiences Shape the Brain - and the trajectory of the lab

A joint ASET-TCGH event commemorating "International Day for Women & Girls in Science"

I will describe our lab's research in the influence of early life stress in determining life-long behavioral, metabolic and stress responses, and how some of the early challenges we went through as a lab directly contributed to the shaping of this line of work.

About the Speaker:
Vidita received her undergraduate training in Life Science and Biochemistry at St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai. She obtained her doctoral degree in Neuroscience at Yale University with the late Professor Ronald Duman, and after postdoctoral fellowships at the Karolinska Institute and Oxford University, she returned to a faculty position at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in 2000. She is a Senior Professor at TIFR and a fellow of all three Indian Science academies. She received the National Bioscientist Award in 2012, the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in Medical Sciences in 2015, and the Infosys Prize for Life Sciences in 2022. She was awarded the Nature Award for Excellence in Mentorship in India in 2019.  Her research group is interested in understanding the neurocircuitry of emotion, its modulation by life experience, and the alterations in emotional neurocircuitry that underlie complex psychiatric disorders like depression. She is committed to enhancing equity, diversity, and inclusion in academia.