The UA Integrative Systems Neuroscience Seminar Series will welcome Christian Lemon, an associate professor of biology at the University of Oklahoma, to speak on "Tasting Temperature and Pain." The seminar will take place at noon Thursday, April 29.

The sense of taste plays an important role in guiding food selection behaviors and ingestive preferences in diverse animals, such as humans and mice. Understanding how taste works has important implications for delineating the role of sensory factors in health and disease states, including obesity.

Historically, taste has been studied as an independent sensory system, isolated from other sensory modalities. However, old and new data from perceptual to neural levels of analysis reveal taste processing in the periphery and brain depends on the interaction of taste sensations with other modalities, such as temperature.

This talk will discuss work on the confluence of taste and temperature processing in the brain, including the recent discovery of a neural circuit that supports an intersection between taste, thermal and nociceptive (pain-related) signals in the mid brain. 

Lemon received his Ph.D. in psychobiology from Binghamton University. He went on to do post-doctoral training in sensory neurobiology at the University of Maryland and University of Tennessee medical schools.

He is currently an associate professor of biology at the University of Oklahoma. Lemon's scientific interests reside in sensory processing and elucidating the molecular and neural circuit mechanisms that underlie perception and sensory-guided behaviors. 

The event is free and open to faculty, postdocs, grad students and undergrads! To join, go to Zoom log-in.