Beatriz Luna, PhD
University of Pittsburgh
Beatriz Luna, PhD is the Distinguished Staunton Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics and Professor of Psychology and BioEngineering at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the founder and Director of the Laboratory for Neurocognitive Development, the founder and acting past president of the Flux Society for Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, and Editor and Chief of the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. Dr. Luna uses multimodal neuroimaging to investigate the neurobiological mechanisms that support the transition from adolescence to adulthood when lifetime trajectories are determined to inform basic processes of normative development and abnormal trajectories such as in mental illness. She has received numerous awards including the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering, the Provost’s Award for Excellence in Doctoral Mentoring, and Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry. Her research has been continuously supported by the National Institutes of Mental Health and has informed US Supreme Court briefs regarding extended sentencing in the juvenile justice system.
Specialization of Frontostriatal systems through adolescence
During adolescence there is significant specialization of executive and affective brain systems and their connectivity, that support cognitive and affective maturation, determining adult trajectories. We use multimodal neuroimaging including 7TMRSI to characterize developmental changes of prefrontal excitatory glutamate and inhibitory GABAergic balance as well as confirmatory EEG indices of E/I suggestive of critical period plasticity. In parallel, we characterize how dopaminergic striatal function underlies specialization of frontostriatal connectivity. Together, results indicate that while executive prefrontal function is available by adulthood, it continues to specialize supporting stabilization and flexibility of cognition while affective systems attenuate. These results support our Driven Dual Systems model of development proposing that during adolescence there is a distinct improvement of executive function that is driven by enhanced affective processing supporting sensation seeking, which is necessary for obtaining unique novel experiences needed to specialize into adulthood.