The Brain-Body Connection: Stavros Niarchos Foundation Brain Insight Lecture
Columbia neuroscientists Wes Grueber and Mimi Shirasu-Hiza explore how the brain monitors hunger, fatigue, and illness — using fruit flies to unlock human biology.
Why we picked this
Grueber and Shirasu-Hiza work at one of the world's most serious neuroscience institutes, and this is the kind of public lecture that makes you realize how little you understood about your own body before walking in.
How does your brain know when you’re hungry, tired, or sick? That deceptively simple question sits at the center of this public lecture from two of Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute researchers, where neuroscience, genetics, and physiology converge around a surprisingly useful organism: the fruit fly. As a model for understanding neurobiological signaling, Drosophila has unlocked insights into brain-body communication that translate directly to human health and disease.
Wes Grueber is a Professor of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics and Neuroscience at Columbia and Co-Director of the Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior. Mimi Shirasu-Hiza, Professor of Genetics and Development at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and Vice Chair of Education, brings a genetics lens to questions about how the brain regulates long-term health outcomes. Together, they trace the pathways between neural signaling and bodily states — hunger, sleep, immune response — in ways that illuminate both basic biology and broader questions about how we maintain health over a lifetime.
The event is part of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Brain Insight Lecture series, which brings cutting-edge Columbia neuroscience to a general public audience. Held at the Renzo Piano-designed Jerome L. Greene Science Center — home to the Zuckerman Institute’s sixty research laboratories — it offers rare access to researchers working at the frontier of how the brain and body talk to each other.