Ann Kennedy, Ph.D.

Research

The Kennedy lab examines the neural mechanisms that shape an animal’s response to different competing needs. To survive and reproduce, animals must balance when and how they react to conditions that might elicit conflicting behaviors—for example, having to forage for food while also avoiding a predator. Past studies have shown that a class of molecules called neuropeptides serve an important modulatory role in the brain, altering the activity of neural circuits that control animal behavior. For example, recent work has identified neuropeptides whose expression alters aggression in response to social isolation or suppresses pain in the face of hunger to allow animals to search for food even when they are injured. Using a suite of techniques in computational neuroscience, statistical analysis, and neural circuit modeling, I will determine how neuropeptides alter the activity of neural populations to permit flexible and state-dependent expression of survival behaviors like aggression, foraging, and wound-tending. This work will reveal how animals make decisions about how to balance competing needs, a type of cognitive processing that can be impaired in some neurological conditions.