The 2025 Rhodes Lecture was delivered this April by Dr. Catherine Dulac. Dr. Dulac is the Samuel W. Morris University Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Dr. Dulac’s work focuses on understanding brain mechanisms underlying the control of social and sickness behaviors in mammals. Her research has helped decipher the unique characteristics of social recognition, including the sensory cues that trigger distinct social behaviors, the nature and identity of social behavior circuits in males and females and their modulation by the animal physiological status. Her work combines cutting edge genetics, transcriptomics, physiology and imaging approaches to uncover the neural basis underlying instinctive social behaviors, a set of brain functions that are typically highly impaired in mental illness. In recent work, she discovered how specific brain circuits direct adaptive changes in behavior during sickness episodes and encode social isolation versus social grouping, thus providing a new framework to understand the regulation of social behaviors in health and disease.
The Rhodes Lecture title was Neurobiology of Sickness and Social Behavior. The keynote address for the Biology Undergraduate Research Symposium was Molecular and Cellular Architecture of the Mouse Social Brain: from Genes to Circuits. Following her two talks, she had a wine & cheese mentoring session with graduate students.