A conversation with 2024 Keynote Speaker Nicola Palomero-Gallagher (OHBM 2024 keynote interview series pt.5)
Dr. Nicola Palomero-Gallagher is the leader of the Receptors research group at the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1) Research Centre Jülich and an Assistant Research Scientist at C. & O. Vogt Institute for Brain Research, Heinrich-Heine-University. She is also a Senior Editor of Brain Structure and Function. She studied biology at Sciences Faculty of the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid, Spain and was a PhD student at the C. & O. Vogt-Brain Research Institute of the Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany, between 1992 and 1999, where she received her PhD in Neuroanatomy. Dr. Palomero-Gallagher’s research focuses on the molecular and structural organization of the cerebral cortex. Her major goal is to understand the relationship between brain structure and function, with an emphasis on the receptor-architectonic basis of cortical segregation and interareal interactions in both humans and non-human primates.
Dr. Palomero-Gallagher has always enjoyed looking down the microscope, and her interests naturally evolved from there as she continued to explore the cytoarchitecture of the brain and also the distribution of receptors across different species. During her doctoral training, she found that the distribution of receptors “doesn’t just show borders between areas. When we compare the expression levels of different kinds of receptors in the brain and in different areas, this helps us find out things about the functional organization of these areas.” Because of this, she is very interested in the link between the brain structure and function. This passion has led to her recent work on the macaque brain atlas. Her work centered on elucidating the organizational principles of the brain, such as cytoarchitectonics, receptor distribution, and functional connectivity of the macaque frontal lobe and the complex relationship between the expression levels of receptors and their encoding genes. Her work spans across both humans and non-human primates, which led to her discovery of homologs between human and macaque brains.
In this interview, Dr. Palomero-Gallagher shares aspects of her work, long-term goals of her research, and her vision of the future of brain mapping. In addition, she provides important advice on a healthy mentor-mentee relationship. And she even gives us a sneak peak of her upcoming keynote at 2024 OHBM in Seoul, Korea.
You can find the video interview here or listen to the audio-only podcast version here (or on your podcast app of choice).
If you’d like to read a summary of one of Dr. Palomero-Gallagher’s recent works, see our Brain Bites summary here.