​Our society has a long philosophical and cultural history of separating the body and the mind.  Recent advances in neuroscience have demonstrated that precisely the opposite is true. Cognitive and emotional wellbeing are greatly influenced by a complex interplay among the body’s neural, endocrine, metabolic, and immune systems.  This has important personal and public health implications.  In this lecture, Dr. Simmons will provide an overview of evidence for the links between physical and mental health, with particular attention paid to child and adolescent development.  Key themes will include: (a) how physical activity improves brain health, thereby affecting cognition and emotional wellbeing; (b) how a healthy diet affects brain and body function, and (c) the critical importance of sleep in brain development.

Dr. W. Kyle Simmons completed his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology at Emory University, and his postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institute of Mental Health. Currently, Dr. Simmons is a tenured Associate Professor at The University of Tulsa and Principal Investigator and Director of the Appetitive and Interoceptive Psychopathology Lab at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa.

William K. Warren, Jr.  Frontiers in Neuroscience Conference

Where: Laureate Conference Center, 6655 South Yale Ave, Tulsa, OK 74136
When: Tuesday, January 10th, 2017

11:00am - 11:45 pm    Registration and Lunch
12:00pm - 1:00 pm      Program
 
“Your Brain on Stress! From Molecules, Neural Circuits to Stress-related Diseases”
 
Dr. Rajita Sinha, is the Foundations Fund Endowed Professor in Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Yale University School of Medicine. She is also the Chief of the Psychology Section and Co-Director of Education for the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation (home of Yale’s CTSA). Her Ph.D. was in Biological Psychology and she then retrained in Clinical Psychology and is a licensed Clinical Psychologist with expertise in mood, anxiety and addictive disorders. Dr. Sinha has previously served as the Director of Addiction Services at the Connecticut Mental Health Center and is the founding director of the Yale Interdisciplinary Stress Center that focuses on neuroscience mechanisms of stress, reward and self-control that promote addiction and chronic disease risk, and development of novel therapeutic approaches to address these mechanisms. She is internationally known for her pioneering research on the mechanisms linking stress biology to compulsive seeking, addiction relapse and recovery from addiction. She has also elucidated sex differences in stress biology that affects addiction risk, relapse and recovery. Her research has been supported by a series of NIH funded research projects for over 20 years and she has published over 250 scientific peer reviewed publications in these areas. Dr. Sinha currently serves on the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism’s Advisory Council and also on the NIH Common Fund supported Science of Behavior Change Program’s Expert Scientific Panel.
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Learning points:
1. Identify the neural responses to stress and it’s connection to resilient and maladaptive coping behaviors.
2. Learn about the glucocorticoid role in motivated behaviors such as alcohol, nicotine and palatable food consumption.
3. Identify at least one therapeutic approach to promote resilience and improve stress-coping.​
 
To register, email:  Lauren Haguewood at lehaguewood@saintfrancis.com