Dr. Catherine Dulac Gives 2026 Issam M. Fares Family Lecture at the Duncan NRI

Houston - (September 29, 2026) - Catherine Dulac, PhD, Xander University Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator gave the 2026 Issam M. Fares Family Lecture on September 29th at the Duncan NRI.  Her talk, "Neurobiology of Social and Sickness Behavior" was well attended and provided wonderful discussion topics during the reception that followed the lecture.  

About Dr. Dulac

Catherine Dulac is the Xander University Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.

Dr. Dulac’s work focuses on understanding brain mechanisms underlying the control of social and sickness behaviors in mammals. Her research has helped decipher the unique characteristics of social recognition, including the sensory cues that trigger distinct social behaviors, the nature and identity of social behavior circuits in males and females and their modulation by the animal physiological status. Her work combines cutting edge genetics, transcriptomics, physiology and imaging approaches to uncover the neural basis underlying instinctive social behaviors, a set of brain functions that are typically highly impaired in mental illness. In recent work, she discovered how specific brain circuits direct adaptive changes in behavior during sickness episodes and encode social isolation versus social grouping, thus providing a new framework to understand the regulation of social behaviors in health and disease. 

Dr. Dulac grew up in Montpellier, France, graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris,  and received her PhD from the University of Paris VI. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University before joining the faculty at Harvard University in 1996. She was Chair of Harvard's Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology from 2007 to 2013 and is currently the Xander University Professor. 

She is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the French Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. She is an Officer of the Legion d’Honneur and a recipient of multiple awards including the Richard Lounsbery Award, the Pradel Research Award, the Ralph W. Gerard Prize (co-recipient with Michael Greenberg), and the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. She is a member of numerous Scientific Advisory Boards in the US and abroad and served as the Co-Chair of the National Institutes of Health Advisory Committee to the NIH Director (ACD), BRAIN Initiative 2.0 Working Group. 

About the Issam M. Fares Family Lectureship

Nijad and Zeina Fares endowed the Fares Lectureship in honor of Nijad Fares' father, His Excellency Issam M. Fares.  Their continued generosity enables the Duncan NRI to draw the entire Texas Medical Center community together once a year to host the leading lights in neuroscientific research.