Colloquia: Rebecca Knickmeyer

You are invited to the 2009 Spring IU Animal Behavior Colloquia.

Friday, May 1, 2009
2:00 p.m.
Student Building, Room 150

Rebecca Knickmeyer, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, will present, "Sex on the Brain: Gonadal steroids and genetic factors in human neurodevelopment."

Abstract:
Relative risk levels for many psychiatric disorders are dramatically different in males and females. Early-onset neurodevelopmental disorders occur significantly more often in males then females, including autism, ADHD, and early onset persistent antisocial behavior. Other conditions, such as schizophrenia, occur at similar rates in males and females, but the sexes differ in age of onset, symptomatology and course of disease. It has been hypothesized that the prevalence and expression of these disorders is related to sex differences in brain development and that sex chromosome effects and early exposure to gonadal hormones (especially androgens and estrogens) are strong candidates for a causal role. The speaker will discuss strategies for studying sex hormone and sex chromosome effects in human populations. She will characterize sex-differences in brain morphology during infancy and childhood, review evidence linking variation in prenatal testosterone exposure to social and communicative development and present recent data on whether early testosterone exposure and sex chromosome abnormalities predict variation in neonatal brain morphology.

Sponsored by the Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior (CISAB). This speaker is part of the A501 Animal Behavior Seminar on “Hormones and Human Behavior” organized by Dr. Michael Muehlenbein.