News

We are delighted to announce that Beatriz Luna, PhD (Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Professor of Psychology and Bioengineering and Staunton Professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry), has received the Flux Society’s Huttenlocher Lecturer Award. The award commemorates a senior scientist who has made outstanding and significant contributions to the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience.

An internationally recognized developmental neuroscientist, Dr. Luna is a leader in the study of the neural basis of cognitive development. Her findings have influenced views of how lifetime trajectories are disrupted in psychiatric illness, and have had substantial impact on public policy. She is a pioneer in the use of multi-modal neuroimaging methods to identify the brain systems that undergo developmental specialization in the transition from adolescence to adulthood, a developmental period when psychopathology often emerges. Dr. Luna has provided innovative evidence for her Driven Dual Systems Model, which posits that during adolescence, brain systems supporting cognition are available but are driven by elevated levels of reward and sensation seeking. She found, for the first time in humans in vivo, that while dopamine availability is established by adolescence, D2/D3 receptor density decreases into adulthood—work that contributed to a non-invasive MRI approach to obtain measures of dopamine availability.

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Luna!