About Us

The Conte Center @ UCI addresses the complex developmental mechanisms contributing to adolescent resilience or vulnerabilities to mental illnesses. It focuses on probing the contribution of early life experience to brain programming that governs resilience and vulnerability during adolescence.

To enable discoveries and enhance their impact on adolescent cognitive behaviors, UC Irvine’s Conte Center on Brain Programming in Adolescent Vulnerabilities employ neurobiological and molecular research with animals, behavioral research with children, and circuit analyses via neuroimaging and computational approaches across species. The center serves as a focus of research and a magnet for trainees through its monthly gatherings, seminar series, symposia and outreach
activities.

Center research employs advanced structural and functional brain imaging in a unique, large and well-characterized cohort of children, followed with their mothers since prenatal life. In parallel, Center research employs state-of-the-art molecular approaches to gene regulation in time and space using animal models. Conte Center Aims will: 1) characterize patterns of pre- and postnatal maternal signals that influence adolescent vulnerabilities across species, using conventional and innovative methods, and generate trajectories of altered behaviors in infancy, childhood and adolescence; 2) address the potential underlying mechanisms using common platforms in humans and rodents, including structural and functional imaging, and mechanistic studies in rodents; 3) through a strong statistical and computational approach, combine behavioral and imaging outcomes along time to generate potentially predictive models for adolescent behaviors that augur pathology.

The Conte Center @ UCI brings together scientists from diverse disciplines, who are leaders and experts in a broad array of approaches. Conte Center Members are Neuroscientists, Developmental Psychologists, leaders in Informatics, Computation and Statistics (ICS), and experts in structural and functional imaging. Members of the Conte Center have appointments across UCI, including the School of Medicine and the Departments of Anatomy and Neurobiology, Pediatrics, Neurology, and the ICS.

The Internal Advisory Board and External Advisory Board endow the Conte Center @ UCI with depth and breadth of expertise. The newly created Conte Center @ UCI welcomes your interest, questions, and contributions.