The Brain Evolution and Mental Health Conference aims to bring together scientists and clinicians interested in exploring the brain at a cellular level across the Tree of Life, uncovering evolutionarily conserved and species-specific mechanisms of social behavior, and understanding mechanisms of human mental disorders.
June 17th, 2026
Public Lecture
4:00pm
Alice Campbell Alumni Center
601 S. Lincoln Avenue, Urbana
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June 17th & 18th, 2026
Conference Sessions
9:00am
612 IGB Conference Center
1206 W. Gregory Drive, Urbana
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- Speakers
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Dr. Gene E. Robinson
Genomic Pillars of the Social Brain: Lessons from the Honey Bee
Social brains have given rise to traits that have helped shape life on our planet, including agriculture, construction, governance, language, manufacture, and warfare. These traits are best known in our own species, but also have evolved repeatedly in a group of insects that includes the ants, bees, and wasps, with honey bees widely considered a paragon of sociality. This lecture uses the honey bee to reveal genomic pillars of the social brain that pertain to some of the afore-mentioned traits. Results will be presented that demonstrate that: 1) different behavioral states are characterized by different patterns of brain gene expression and gene regulatory network topologies; 2) changes in brain gene expression mediate changes in behavior in concert with changes in neural activity; and 3) common genetic building blocks are used to support similar types of social capacities in different species, from bees to humans. These findings provide the basis for an understanding of nature and nurture in which both shape each other via the actions of genes across multiple timescales, from physiological to generational to evolutionary.
Dr. Daniel Geschwind
Dr. Daniel Geschwind is the Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Distinguished Professor of neurology, psychiatry and human genetics at the UCLA School of Medicine, and the Senior Associate Dean and Associate Vice Chancellor of Precision Medicine in the UCLA Health System and David Geffen School of Medicine. The arching goal of Dr, Geschwind’s work is to develop a more mechanistic understanding of neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases by integrative analyses that connect human genetic variation to genes and neurobiological pathways. The laboratory combines genetic, genomic and bio-informatic approaches with basic neurobiological investigation in model systems and human brain. The hope is that by understanding disease mechanisms we can develop more rationale and effective therapeutics for brain disorders. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Physicians, and the National Academy of Medicine, USA, which awarded him the Rhoda and Bernard Sarnat International Award in Mental Health in 2022.
Human cognitive variation, genomics and evolution: Is autism really a disease?
Human behavior and cognition is highly variable and like other human features, consists of many components that are unrelated, each of which is normally distributed in the population. In addition, we know that many of these features are highly heritable, and include factors that may also predispose to common human disorders. The same is true for brain structure, which is the organ that underlies cognition and behavior. Genetic studies show that many of the variants that underlie these phenotypes are common (> 1%) in the population. This supports the view that disease susceptibility is another side of the coin of common human variation, which is largely on a continuum. I discuss this in the context of autism spectrum disorders, where autistic-like social dysfunction is clearly related to the genetics of social cognition in the population. Moreover, genetic susceptibility for ASD is correlated with many human attributes, such as educational attainment or IQ. This is consistent with the view that human what we think of as disease risks are related to what are considered strengths in other areas, which leads us to a view of human brain function that emphasizes individual differences. Molecular studies implicate gene regulatory regions, such as human accelerated regions and human gained enhancers as being enriched in neuropsychiatric disease risk, supporting the view that these are fundamental aspects of the human condition.
Dr. Dmitry Velmeshev
Dmitry Velmeshev is an Assistant Professor of Neurobiology and Biomedical Engineering at Duke University. He received his PhD from University of Miami, and completed his postdoc training at University of California, San Francisco in the laboratory of Arnold Kriegstein, where he studied cell type-specific molecular mechanisms of human cortical development and brain disorders. His awards include the Avenir DP1 award from the NIH, K99/R00 Path to Independence Award and a Whitehead Scholar award through Duke University. His research uses single-cell genomics, spatial transcriptomic and transsynaptic viral tracing applied to human brain tissue samples, cerebral organoids, and rodent models to understand cell type-specific mechanisms of brain development and neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism.
Cell type-specific dissection and modulation of neural circuit architecture and function
Our ability to probe and manipulate molecular profiles of specific cells types have been improving dramatically thanks to advances in genome editing and single-cell genomics. However, all brain functions rely on precisely organized and specialized neural circuits, and the ability to dissect and manipulate specific neural circuits is still limited. To address these gaps, we developed methods to profile the organization of specific circuits at scale using a combination of novel inducible barcoded rabies virus and spatial transcriptomics. We apply this method to study the development of early cortical circuits, as well as the architecture of adult circuits involved in social communication. To enable circuits-specific gene manipulation, we designed CRISPR-rabies virus (CRV), which leverages the trans-synaptic spread of rabies virus to enable gene editing within anatomically defined neural circuits. By pairing CRV with cell type-specific Cas9 expression, we achieved targeted gene modifications in specific circuits. We demonstrate that CRV can modulate sodium and potassium channel expression in parvalbumin interneurons, thereby effectively regulating synaptic transmission of pyramidal neurons in the CA3 region of the hippocampus. Its compatibility with 3′-capture single-cell RNA-seq allows simultaneous circuit perturbation and molecular profiling. CRV allows precise circuit-level gene modulation, providing a platform for studying gene function in neural circuits and developing novel gene therapies for brain disorders.
Dr. Hongkui Zeng
Hongkui Zeng is Executive Vice President and Director of Brain Science at Allen Institute. She studies neuronal diversity and connectivity in the mammalian brain-wide circuits in the context of development, function and disease. Through her leadership of multidisciplinary teams, she has built research programs using transcriptomic, connectomic and multimodal approaches to characterize and classify the wide variety of cell types in the brain, laying the foundation for understanding brain function in healthy and diseased conditions. Her work has led to many large-scale, open-access datasets and tools that have become widely adopted community resources and standards, including transgenic mouse lines, Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas, the Common Coordinate Framework (CCF), and the brain-wide transcriptomic cell type taxonomy and atlas.
Zeng received her Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology from Brandeis University, where she studied the molecular mechanisms of the circadian clock in fruit flies. As a postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she studied the molecular and synaptic mechanisms underlying hippocampus-dependent plasticity and learning. She has received many honors, including the 2016 AWIS Award for Scientific Advancement, the 2018 Gill Transformative Investigator Award, the 2023 Pradel Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences, and the 2024 Asian American Engineer of the Year (AAEOY) Award. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine.
Mammalian brain cell type diversity and dynamics in behavior and disease
To understand the function of the brain and how its dysfunction leads to brain diseases, it is essential to uncover the cell type composition of the brain, how the cell types are connected with each other and what their roles are in circuit function. At the Allen Institute, we generated a comprehensive and high-resolution transcriptomic and spatial cell type atlas for the whole adult mouse brain, including >5,300 clusters that are hierarchically organized. To reveal the evolutionary conservation and divergence of cell types in the mammalian brain, we are creating similarly high-resolution cell type atlases for human and non-human primate brains and computationally integrating them into cross-species aligned cell type taxonomies, first for basal ganglia and towards the whole brain.
Extending from these foundational reference atlases, we have investigated the dynamic changes of transcriptomic profiles of specific cell types in the developing and aging brain, as well as under various behavioral and drug-treated conditions. By measuring cell type-specific expression of various immediate early genes (IEGs) as well as other differentially expressed genes (DEGs), we identified highly specific transcriptomic cell types (T-types) activated by innate behaviors across the hypothalamus and extended amygdala. In a brain-wide survey of T-types responsive to acute or chronic administration of addictive or psychoactive compounds, we uncovered distinct patterns of cell type activation and differential gene expression in many brain regions responding to different drugs. These findings will facilitate deeper investigation of the neural circuits governing diverse behavioral phenotypes and offer new insights into the mechanisms underlying drug addiction and neuropsychiatric disorders.
Dr. Dave Zhao
Dave is an Associate Professor of Statistics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a member of the Gene Networks in Neural and Developmental Plasticity research theme at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, where he is also the Director of Computational Genomics. He received his PhD in Biostatistics from Harvard University and performed postdoctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania in the Departments of Biostatistics and Statistics
New analytical frameworks for single-cell and spatial neurobiology
Today's technologies can generate fantastically rich, large-scale genomic data from brain tissue, prompting great excitement about the neurobiology they may reveal. However, as William James wrote, "We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyze them," which constrain the questions we can pose and the analyses we can perform. In this talk, I will describe how an ongoing cross-species study of aggression, carried out by a team of collaborators, has stretched the limits of the current dominant analytical paradigms of single-cell and spatial biology. I will then describe our work on an alternative set of statistical frameworks and computational methods that enable more flexible analytical questions and uncover distinct scientific insights.
Dr. Yichun He
Yichun He is an incoming assistant professor at the School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research explores how genes shape cellular and tissue function in complex biological systems by developing causal, multimodal, and agentic frameworks with applications in spatial multi-omics and brain-machine interfaces across molecular, cellular, and functional scales. She is currently an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She received her Ph.D. in bioengineering from Harvard University in 2025, where she developed scalable approaches for large-scale gene expression mapping and long-term neural recording.
Predicting brain organization and perturbation effects with foundational, causal and agentic models
Psychiatric and neurological disorders arise from genetic risk that manifests with striking cell-type and regional specificity in the brain, yet we lack spatial molecular frameworks to systematically resolve these effects. In this talk, I will present an integrative approach combining spatial transcriptomics integration, causal perturbation modeling, and agentic AI to address this challenge. First, I will introduce a self-supervised deep learning framework, FuseMap, that integrates seven spatial transcriptomics atlases spanning 18.6 million cells and 26,665 genes into a unified spatial brain foundation model, enabling harmonized cell-type mapping, transcriptome-wide gene imputation, and discovery of previously uncharted brain subregions. Leveraging cross-species transfer learning, FuseMap reveals conserved and divergent spatial cell-type organization between mouse, marmoset, and human brains. Applied to Alzheimer's disease models, FuseMap uncovers a conserved plaque-responsive microglial program and subtype-resolved compositional shifts during brain aging. I will then introduce a causal framework that predicts cell-type-resolved transcriptional responses to genetic perturbations by modeling signaling cascades, applied to psychiatric disease–relevant genes effects in the mouse brain. Finally, I will describe an agentic AI system that orchestrates atlas exploration, data analysis, and biological interpretation, establishing a scalable pipeline from spatial atlas construction to mechanistic insight for brain disorders.
Dr. David Anderson
David J. Anderson has been a member of the faculty in the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena since 1986. He is currently the Director of the TianQiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Anderson received his AB from Harvard College in 1978, did his PhD training with the late Günter Blobel, a Nobel Laureate at The Rockefeller University, and his postdoctoral work with Richard Axel, a Nobel Laureate at Columbia. He is an alumnus of the 1979 MBL Neurobiology Course. Dr. Anderson's research career has spanned multiple topics in neuroscience, from the study of neural crest stem cells that generate the developing peripheral nervous system, to the neural circuits that mediate innate emotional behaviors, such as fear and aggression.
He has published over 225 primary research articles and is the co-author with Caltech colleague Ralph Adolphs of The Neuroscience of Emotion: a New Synthesis (2018, Princeton University Press). Dr. Anderson has trained over 50 PhD students or postdoctoral fellows. He received the W. Alden Spencer Award in Neurobiology from Columbia University in 1999, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2002), the US National Academy of Sciences (2007), and is a recipient of the 2017 Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize and the 2018 Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience from MIT. Dr. Anderson played a key role as an adviser to the late Paul Allen in the founding of the Allen Institute for Brain Sciences and the creation of the Allen Brain Atlas, and continues to serve as an adviser to that Institute. He has also served on two working groups for the NIH's BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovation in Neurotechnology) Initiative.
Dr. Anderson has engaged in the public communication of science through several channels. He published an OpEd in the New York Times, The Alchemy of Stem Cell Research (July 15, 2001), has delivered a TEDx talk ("Your Brain is More than a Bag of Chemicals," 2013) which has received almost 1.5 million views, has appeared on NPRs TED Radio Hour to discuss the talk, the National Edition of NPRs All Things Considered with Jon Hamilton (2019), and two episodes of Charlie Rose's Brain Series hosted by Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel. His work on aggression in fruit flies has been profiled in the NY Times ("To study aggression, a fight club for flies," Feb. 3rd 2014). He has published two books, The Neuroscience of Emotion: A new synthesis (2018) with Ralph Adolphs, and The Beast Within: How emotions guide us (2022).
The Neural Coding of Affective Internal States Underlying Innate Behaviors
Innate survival behaviors such as fighting, mating and predator defense are associated with affective or emotion states. Finding neural representations of such states using supervised analyses is challenging due to a lack of direct state measures. To overcome this limitations, we have performed unsupervised modeling of single-trial neural data acquired during naturalistic social behaviors, using recurrent Switching Linear Dynamical Systems (rSLDS). rSLDS learns a dynamics matrix based on latent factor activity in a state-space approximated by a set of linear substates, yielding a probabilistic model of neural dynamics. When used to model single-trial calcium imaging data recorded from hypothalamic “attack” neurons during aggressive encounters, rSLDS discovered an approximate line attractor that represents the intensity and duration of a scalable and persistent state of aggressiveness. I will discuss features of this representation, evidence for its local instantiation in the hypothalamus, mechanistic implementation and generalization to other social behaviors. Together, these results extend the potential role of line attractor dynamics beyond the representation of cognitive variables, to the representation of affective internal states. They also identify a tractable experimental platform to investigate how circuit-level mechanisms give rise to emergent network dynamics at the manifold level in the mammalian brain.
Dr. Erin Hecht
Dr. Hecht directs the Canine Brains Project. She received a B.S. in Cognitive Science from the University of California San Diego in 2006 and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Emory University in 2013. Dr. Hecht launched the Canine Brains Project while she was a Research Scientist in the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience at Georgia State University and an Affiliated Scientist at the Emory National Primate Research Center. She is now an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.
Dr. Hecht is the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship in Neuroscience and an NSF CAREER Award, both of which fund the Canine Brains Project. She is also an Associate Editor of Brain Structure and Function, a scientific journal that publishes neuroscience research in many species, including dogs. Her research focuses on neuroanatomical specializations in dogs, other canids, humans, and other primates.
The Architecture of Canine Socioemotional Behavior: Interactions Between Evolution, Experience, and Neurobiology
Domestic dog socioemotional behavior is shaped by a complex, lifelong dialogue between heritable predispositions and individual experience. Drawing on large-scale behavioral data and comparative neuroimaging, this talk explores how these factors intersect to produce adult behavioral phenotypes, including fear, aggression, and trained behaviors.
A primary focus will be the impact of early-life adversity. Behavioral analysis demonstrates that traumatic experiences such as abuse, abandonment, or physical injury which occur within a sensitive period before six months of age are significantly associated with increased adult fear and aggression. Notably, the impact of these experiences is moderated by breed ancestry; while some lineages exhibit high sensitivity to early stress, demonstrate relative resilience, suggesting underlying genetic mechanisms for sensitivity and resilience.
To understand the biological underpinnings of these differences, we examine neuroanatomical variation across modern and premodern lineages. Neuroimaging reveals that "problem" behaviors, including stranger-directed fear and aggression, are linked to expansion in subcortical regions like the amygdala and hypothalamus, which are central to flight-or-fight processing. In contrast, trainability is associated with the expansion of the neocortex, a pattern that mirrors evolutionary patterns of neurodevelopmental scaling where larger brains prioritize show expansion in later-developing cortical regions relative to earlier-developing subcortical ones.
Finally, we discuss the emerging finding that spaying and neutering significantly impact brain anatomy. We hypothesize that these physiological shifts further modulate how an individual dog responds to environmental stressors, underscoring the need for a holistic view of canine behavioral health that integrates genetics, developmental timing, and medical status.
Dr. Zach Johnson
My passion for neuroscience was sparked during my undergraduate years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I studied reward learning under the mentorship of Dr. Justin Rhodes. I then pursued a PhD at Emory University, where I used a variety of techniques to study social behavior in prairie voles under the mentorship of Dr. Larry Young. Following this, I completed my postdoc at Georgia Institute of Technology, where I studied the neural and genetic basis of mating behaviors in cichlid fishes under the mentorship of Drs. Todd Streelman and Patrick McGrath. Since launching an independent research program at Emory University in 2023, I have continued to lead collaborative projects aiming to understand the social brain across a wide range of species.
Bridging genes, molecules, cells, and circuits to understand the social brain
How do social experiences change the brain? Our team uses an array of tools spanning genetics, transcriptomics, endocrinology, and circuit neuroscience to answer this question. Our long-term goals are to understand 1) how the social environment shapes specific cell populations and neural circuits, and 2) how these changes relate to mental health risk in humans. In this talk, I will cover some of the progress we have made through studies in diverse species, including voles, cichlids, clownfish, and rhesus macaques.
- June 17th Public Lecture
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4:00 PM Nalbandov Keynote Lecture
Professor of Pediatrics, Psychiatry, and Behavioral Sciences at the Emory University School of Medicine and the Liz and Frank Blake Chair of Children’s Behavioral and Mental Health and inaugural System Chief of Behavioral and Mental Health (BMH) at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.
5:00 PM Question and Answer Session
5:30 PM Reception
- June 17th Conference Program
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Session I: Brain Single Cell Genomics and Mental Health
8:00 AM Doors Open
9:00 - 9:40 AM Dr.Gene Robinson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Genomic Pillars of the Social Brain: Lessons from the Honey Bee
9:40 - 9:45 AM Q&A
9:45 - 10:25 AM Dr.Daniel Geschwind, University of California, Los Angeles Human Cognitive Variation
Genomics and Evolution: Is Autism Really a Disease?
10:25 - 10:30 AM Q&A
10:30 - 10:50 AM Coffee Break
10:50 - 11:20 AM Dr.Dmitry Velmeshev, Duke University
Cell Type-Specific Dissection and Modulation of Neural Circuit Architecture and Function
11:20 - 11:25 AM Q&A
11:25 - 1:00 PM Lunch On Own
1:00 - 1:40 PM Panel Discussion
1:40 - 2:00 PM Coffee Break
2:00 - 2:30 PM Dr.Alvaro Hernandez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Multiomics and Beyond: Advanced NGS Methods for High-Resolution Biology
2:30 – 4:00 PM Free time and travel for Public Lecture (on own)
Alice Campbell Alumni Center
601 S. Lincoln Avenue
Urbana, IL 61801 - June 18th Conference Program
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Session II: Development of New Computational and Experimental Methods for Single Cell Genomics
8:00 am Doors open
9:00 - 9:40 AM Dr.Hongkui Zeng, Allen Institute for Brain Science
Mammalian Brain Cell Type Diversity and Dynamics in Behavior and Disease9:40 - 9:45 AM Q&A
9:45 - 10:25 AM Dr.Dave Zhao, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
New Analytical Frameworks for Single-Cell and Spatial Neurobiology10:25 - 10:30 AM Q&A
10:30 - 10:45 AM Coffee Break
10:45 - 11:25 AM Dr.Yichun He, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Predicting Brain Organization and Perturbation Effects with Foundational, Causal and Agentic Models11:25 - 11:30 AM Q&A
11:30 am - 12:10 pm Panel Discussion
12:10 - 1:30 PM Lunch On Own
Session III: Brain Social Behavior Circuits
1:30 - 2:10 PM Dr.David Anderson, California Institute of Technology
Encoding of hypothalamic affective internal states by neural population dynamics2:10 - 2:15 PM Q&A
2:15 - 2:55 PM Dr.Erin Hecht, Harvard University
The Architecture of Canine Socioemotional Behavior: Interactions Between Evolution, Experience, and Neurobiology2:55 - 3:00 PM Q&A
3:00 - 3:40 PM Dr.Zach Johnson, Emory University
Bridging Genes, Molecules, Cells, and Circuits to Understand the Social Brain3:40 - 3:45 PM Q&A
3:45 - 4:25 PM Panel Discussion 3
4:25 - 5:30 PM Poster Session and Reception
- Organizers
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The conference is organized by the IGB's Gene Networks in Neural and Developmental Plasticity research theme, in collaboration with the Kellner Center for Neurogenomics, Behavior, and Society.
- Support for this event is provided by
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Olga G. Nalbandov Lecture Fund at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
School of Social Work
School of Molecular & Cellular Biology
Grainger College of Engineering
Beckman Institute
Carle Illinois College of Medicine
Department of Bioengineering
Department of Comparative Biosciences
Department of Animal Sciences
Center for Social and Behavioral Science
School of Integrative Biology
Neuroscience Program
IGB Accommodations
For all IGB events, gender-neutral bathrooms are available on floors 1 and 2 of the IGB gatehouse, open from 8 am to 12 pm and 1 pm to 5 pm. A private lactation room for IGB-affiliated members is available by request; see the IGB reception desk for access. Baby changing stations are available in the restrooms on the concourse level. For specific needs, please contact facilities@igb.illinois.edu
Who should attend?
Open to all
Lodging Information
I Hotel & Illinois Conference Center
1900 S 1st St, Champaign, IL 61820
(217) 819-5000