Is depression an infectious disease? | Turhan Canli | TEDxSBU
Published on Dec 17, 2014
This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. Despite 60 years of research, major depression is as vexing as ever. Clinical care is a matter of trial-and-error and research still has not identified the causal mechanisms in the brain. Enter the mind of Turhan Canli, who proposes a radical reconceptualization of depression that changes the way we think about its causes, genetics, and treatment approaches.
Dr. Canli’s primary research interests cover the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and molecular biology. Current work in Dr. Canli’s laboratory focuses on gene-environment interactions, specifically the molecular genetic and epigenetic mechanisms that regulate gene expression across the human genome. This general approach is applied to studies of individual differences in social stress reactivity, traits, and emotional behavior. Research in Dr. Canli’s laboratory covers all levels of analysis: self-report, behavioral, neural, and cellular/molecular. Most work is conducted in humans, but recent projects involve animal models and cell culture assays of gene regulation. Behavioral studies are conducted in the Department of Psychology. Neuroimaging studies are conducted in the SCAN (Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience) Center. Molecular (epi-) genetic studies are conducted in Dr. Canli’s lab in the Center for Molecular Medicine and the Psychology Department, the Genomics Core Facility, and the Proteomics Core Facility. Dr. Canli received a Ph.D. is in psychobiology (Yale University ’93), with postdoctoral training in behavioral, cognitive and affective neuroscience (Yale University’93-’95; Stanford University’95-2001), and later sabbatical training in molecular biology.