Adriana Galván is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles and is the Jeffrey Wenzel Term Chair in Behavioral Neuroscience. She is known for her research in the field of brain development, which focuses on how cognitive and social behaviors change from childhood to adulthood. She also currently holds the position of Director of the Galván Laboratory for Developmental Neuroscience at UCLA.
Galván has been conducting research in the Galván Laboratory for Developmental Neuroscience at UCLA. Her research consists of the brain and its correlation to the processing and understanding of its development through childhood and adolescence leading up to adulthood. Her research received funding from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institute of Mental Health, National Science Foundation, and the National Institute on Drug Addiction. The main point of Galván's research program is to understand what neural mechanisms are being used during certain interactions, such as social interactions, risk-taking, and decision-making and how these experiences change their behavior and brain function. Currently, Galván is working on a few different projects such as Brain Development and Learning, Neural Correlates of Adolescent Decision-Making, Sleep and Emotion, Sleep Habits and Risk-taking Behaviors, and Stress and Brain Function. Galván's focus on the brain and decision making in adolescents is guided with the help of brain imaging to detect any psychological, neurobiological, and biological changes from childhood to adulthood in adolescents. In her studies, Galván has addressed many environmental factors that can affect behavior in adolescents. Her work has also helped support the idea that adolescence is considered a transition out of childhood and into becoming an adult. Galván's recent research has shown that the brains of adolescents have the ability to learn and process new information. Galván's work has presented a different outlook on the human brain and has impacted science, law, and social policy. In one of her studies, Galván examined the neural systems of neurobiological development in behavior and how fatal outcomes from risk-taking behavior can characterize adolescence. Her study suggests that accumbens activity in adolescents correlated with activity in adults, but the orbital frontal cortex activity in adolescents looked more similar to those of children instead of adults. Another one of her studies shows how Galván examined the neural correlates in adolescents, children, and adults of risk-taking behavior to compare the activity in each brain and see who is at the greatest risk. This study suggests that individuals are most likely to develop risky behaviors when going through adolescence due to developmental changes in agreement with variability in a person's inclination to engage in this type of behavior. Galván is the author of "The Neuroscience of Adolescence." and has worked on over 97 manuscripts from the years 2004–2019. On June 25, 2020, she was named University of California, Los Angeles's new dean of undergraduate education; her deanship begins on July 1.
Casey, B. J., Getz, S., & Galván, A.. The adolescent brain. Developmental Review, 28, 62–77.
Galván, A., Hare, T. A., Parra, C. E., Penn, J., Voss, H., Glover, G., & Casey, B. J.. Earlier development of the accumbens relative to orbitofrontal cortex might underlie risk-taking behavior in adolescents. Journal of Neuroscience, 26, 6885–6892.
Hare, T. A., Tottenham, N., Galván, A., Voss, H. U., Glover, G. H., & Casey, B. J.. Biological substrates of emotional reactivity and regulation in adolescence during an emotional go-nogo task. Biological Psychiatry, 63, 927–934.
