Catherine Dulac

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 in 1992. She completed postdoctoral training 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.

Dr. Dulac is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the French Academy of Sciences, and was designated an Officer of the Legion d’Honneur in 2022. She is a recipient of multiple awards including the Lounsbery Award, the Pradel Award, the Ralph W. Gerard Prize, and the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.