PSYC/NSCI Lecture: Dr. Julia Basso (Midd 04.5) "Exercise and the brain: a bi-directional relationship"

Dr. Basso’s research focuses on the interaction between exercise and the brain. During her PhD, she discovered that the medial prefrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens regulate the motivation for voluntary wheel running in the rat. For Basso’s post-doctoral research, she is investigating the effects of acute and chronic exercise on learning, memory, cognition, mood, and exercise motivation in humans. Collectively, this work is revealing the details and mechanisms of the bi-directional relationship between exercise and the brain. Dr. Basso’s overall view is that the brain both regulates our internal motivation for exercise and exercise has the ability to sculpt a variety of brain-region specific cognitive processes.

Dr. Basso is a Post-doctoral fellow, Center for Neural Science, New York University and Graduate fellow, Center for Molecular & Behavioral Neuroscience, Rutgers University