The Human Brain as a Teacher: Learning Generosity, and New Insights on Psychiatric Conditions

Join us as Dr. Sabina Berretta explores groundbreaking advances in neuroscience that are transforming our understanding of mental health. Dr. Berretta will reveal how the brain's diverse cells work in harmony like an orchestra to produce complex functions, and how disruptions in this cellular coordination can affect cognitive flexibility and adaptability in conditions like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. This session will also highlight the profound impact of brain donation, a gift of knowledge that fuels these discoveries and offers hope for future healing.

About Sabina Berretta, MD

Sabina Berretta, MD, began her research training at Institute of Human Physiology, University of Catania, Italy. In 1990, she joined the laboratory directed by Dr. A. M. Graybiel in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, where she worked on neural circuitry linking the motor cortex to basal ganglia. In 1997, Sabina moved to McLean Hospital-Harvard Medical School to work in the laboratory directed by Dr. F.Benes. There she developed an animal model designed to investigate GABAergic abnormalities in schizophrenia and developed her work on human brain tissue. In 1999, Sabina became the director of the Translational Neuroscience Laboratory at McLean Hospital. She and her team conduct investigations on the biology of psychiatric symptoms across brain disorders. Their studies focus on neural circuits involved in emotion processing and their intersection with executive functions. Her group has published extensively on the role of these brain regions in emotion dysregulation in psychiatric disorders. In 2014, Sabina became the director of the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center(HBTRC), one of six NIH NeuroBioBank sites. Her work with the HBTRC aims to make research on nervous system disorders possible. The HBTRC does this by collecting brain donations from persons suffering from neurological, psychiatric and neurodevelopmental conditions and distributing them to investigators across the world.