By Jill Radsken,
Rewarded for neural study of parenting behavior that reoriented field
Catherine Dulac, Lee and Ezpeleta Professor of Arts and Sciences and Higgins Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, has been awarded a 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for her pioneering work identifying the neural circuitry that regulates parenting behavior in both males and females.
“One of the beauties of science is teamwork,” said Dulac, who described being “shocked” upon receiving the news. “All of this work was thought through and performed in very close collaboration with grad students, undergraduates, and postdocs. You never think alone.”
“Social behavior used to live in either the realm of psychology or ethology [the study of animal behavior, usually with a focus on natural conditions]. Most neuroscientists typically work on the cortex while we looked at hypothalamus, the area of the brain that organizes social behaviors. They viewed it as less,” she said. “[But] humans are very arrogant. Evolutionary speaking, we are still animals, eating, sleeping, mating, parenting — these are things we have to do. These behaviors do not live in the cortex. They all come from the hypothalamus, and the corresponding circuitry tends to be very conserved across animal species.”
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