*Please note all Winter 2021 Seminars are on zoom: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/97216069429

“Understanding the Social Brain”

Social interactions between individuals and among groups are a hallmark of human society and are critical to the physical and mental health of a wide variety of species including humans. The central goal of our lab is to study general principles of how social behavior is regulated in the brain. We take a multi-disciplinary approach and uses a variety of experimental and computational technologies across molecular, circuit, and behavioral levels. We study how neural circuits regulate social behavioral decisions within a single brain as well as how emergent inter-brain neural properties arise from social interactions between individuals.

BIOGRAPHY:

Dr. Hong is currently an Associate Professor of Biological Chemistry and of Neurobiology at the University of California Los Angeles. Dr. Hong received his PhD degree in 2012 at Stanford University where he studied the molecular mechanism of wiring specificity during neural development. He was a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology studying neural mechanisms of social and emotional behavior. He joined UCLA in 2016 as Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2020. He is also the recipient of a Young Investigator Award from the Society for Neuroscience, an Early Career Award from the Society for Social Neuroscience, a Mallinkrodt Scholar Award, a Vallee Scholar Award, a Searle Scholar Award, a Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering, a McKnight Scholar Award, a Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship, and a Sloan Research Fellowship.​

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