Calendar of Events

Alo Basu, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology at College of the Holy Cross, will present "Neuronal Complexity and Hippocampus-Dependent Cognition."

There is strikingly little understanding, at present, of how cellular and circuit-level variation in the mammalian brain relates to variation in cognition. Following from case studies of brain damage and disease in humans, current understanding of brain-behavior relationships is largely based on results of physical, chemical, pharmacological and genetic "lesions" that result in changes to neuronal morphology, circuit physiology and cognition in experimental systems. We have developed a mouse model of D-serine deficiency which reveals the limitations of the current paradigm, including the pitfalls of hypothesis testing as regards variability in neuronal structure and cognitive function. Further, we have uncovered deleterious effects of standard laboratory housing conditions on cognition in mice that suggest that the range of behavior that is being routinely observed in translational neuroscience is limited. We propose that the analysis of variability in hippocampal neuronal morphology and behavior can be combined with noninvasive environmental enrichment to test assumptions about how complexity of hippocampal neurons relates to hippocampus-dependent cognition in mice.

How did the ancient Greeks imagine the underworld? Their depictions of the life after death reveal the variety of conflicting ideas in the Greek tradition, from the continuative existences after death that preserve cultural memories to the compensatory afterlives that rectify the incompleteness of justice in the mortal world to the grand cosmic visions that bring together life and death, mortal and immortal, chthonic and celestial, into a single system. All these imaginings of afterlife make use of familiar tropes, names and images from the Greek mythic tradition, and each of the authors of an afterlife vision thinks with and through an imagined underworld in different ways for different ends.

A proud Jamaican national, Staceyann’s voice was featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show. She is also widely known as co-writer and original performer in the Tony Award-winning Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway.

She unapologetically identifies as Caribbean and Black, Asian and lesbian, woman and resident of New York City. She is the author of the memoir The Other Side of Paradise.

Join us for a conversation about intersectionality.

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