Harvey Grill

Affective neuroscience - food reward, feeding motivation, food seeking, drug reward, similarity and differences between food and drug reward neurobiology, autonomic and peripheral neural systems of relevance to affective neuroscience

Animal Learning and Behavior – motivation, appetitive and consummatory behavior

Sensation and Perception - taste, gastrointestinal interoception (caloric detection), vagal afferent sensation, skin and central thermosensation/thermoregulation

Clinical translational interests- neural systems of food intake inhibition, neural and endocrine control of energy balance,  drug development and treatment for obesity and type 2 diabetes

Specific Research Areas:

Neural control of food intake, energy expenditure and body weight, Behavioral (feeding) and systems (energy balance, thermoregulation, autonomic) neuroscience; neural systems of relevance to obesity and anorexia, neural basis of reward, motivation and emotion

Research Synopsis: 

The dramatic increase in the prevalence of obese (39% of US adults) and overweight (33% of US adults) individuals has intensified interest in understanding the neurobiologic bases of obesity as a disease with significant health consequences and co-morbidities (e.g., type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer).  Obesity, like hypertension, diabetes, and bipolar disorder, is a chronic recurring disease that requires chronic treatment. Despite emphasis on caloric restriction [dieting] as a treatment for obesity is ineffective as any achieved weight loss alters physiology in a way that that facilitates weight regain. Obesity surgery while effective has serious side effects. Therefore, the development of effective pharmacotherapies is proving critical as a long-term treatment strategy for obesity.  Defining drug targets is guided by findings from basic research on the neurobiology of energy balance. Our lab is focused on defining the signals, neural circuits, neurochemical systems, and intracellular signaling pathways that contribute to the control of food intake, via focusing on alterations in food seeking, feeding motivation, food reward as well as on associative control on feeding and satiation signaling. Unique to our approach is the perspective that the neural control of energy balance is anatomically distributed rather than centered in any one region of the brain. This perspective leads us to examine the neural processing of peripherally generated neural signals (e.g., vagal afferent response to ingested food) and blood-born correlates of energy status signals (e.g., leptin, ghrelin) that act at multiple brain nuclei including but not limited to the caudal brainstem (e.g. NTS, PBN), midbrain (e.g. ventral tegmental area), hypothalamus, thalamus, hippocampus, nucleus accumbens, and prefrontal cortex.  Also influencing our work is the idea that the environmental factors drive feeding behavior through associations formed between environmental cues and reward experience, that food palatability is plastic and is affected by reward experience. Our perspective is that many of these factors involve signaling in anatomically distributed nuclei, and each nucleus rather than serving a singular function likely contributes to several functional controls of feeding.

Professor Harvey Grill is no longer accepting new graduate students.