Lauren M Holsen

I am a clinical neuroscientist working at the intersection of appetite, weight change, and brain at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH)/Harvard Medical School. With expertise in developmental clinical neuroscience, my work over the past 15 years has examined homeostatic, hedonic, and cognitive control circuitry functioning and relationships with appetite-regulatory hormones and metabolic fuels in women with anorexia nervosa (AN) and individuals with obesity, including mechanisms underlying abnormal food intake, central to this proposal. Using task-based BOLD fMRI paradigms with visual food stimuli as a probe of neural responsivity to environmental cues of energy availability, resting cerebral blood flow, and resting-state functional MRI, these studies have revealed novel insights into the acute and chronic effects of energy deficit and surfeit on hormones, metabolic fuels, and brain activity in regions associated with energy balance and reward, and partial restoration of abnormal brain activity following weight restoration (in AN) and loss (via bariatric surgery and diet). My current R01 from NIDDK examines the effect of psychosocial stress on ghrelin, reward circuitry activity, and stress-related transcriptomic factors in hyper- vs. hypophagic depression. I am also PI of a current BWH Women’s Brain Initiative Project focused on the role of ghrelin in changes in memory functioning and neurocircuitry in postmenopausal women with and without obesity, and Co-I on NIMH and NIDDK grants on neural mechanisms underlying weight trajectories in women with AN, eating phenotypes in avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder, and the effects of intranasal oxytocin on weight loss in individuals with obesity.