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Eliza Bliss-Moreau

Education

  • Ph.D., Psychology, Boston College, 2008
  • S.B., Biology and Psychology, Boston College, 2002

About

Eliza Bliss-Moreau is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology and a core scientist at the California National Primate Research Center at UC Davis. She completed her undergraduate (S.B. in biology and psychology) and graduate (Ph.D. in psychology) training at Boston College and postdoctoral training in nonhuman primate neuroscience, primatology, and systems science at UC Davis. Before joining the Department of Psychology, she was a faculty member in the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.

Research Focus

Why is it that some people float through life in a sea of tranquility and others spend their days riding an emotional roller coaster? Why does a traumatic experience result in psychopathology for some but leave others unscathed? What evolutionary purpose does variation in affect serve? How does early development program life-long variation in affective processing? How does the social environment shape the brain and emotion? Answering questions like this is our research team’s goal. The Bliss-Moreau Laboratory conducts translational and comparative affective science using multi-method, multi-species approaches to understand the biological underpinnings of the social and affective lives of humans and nonhuman animals. 

Selected Publications

  • Grayson, D.S., Bliss-Moreau, E., Machado, C.J., Bennett, J. Shen, K., & Amaral, D.G. (2016). The rhesus monkey connectome predicts disrupted functional networks resulting from pharmacogenetics inactivation of the amygdala. In press, Neuron.
  • Touroutoglou, A., Bliss-Moreau, E., Zhang, J., Martini, D., Vanduffel, W., Dickerson, B., & Barrett, L.F. (2016). A ventral salience network in the macaque brain. NeuroImage, 132, 190-197. 
  • Bliss-Moreau, E. & Moadab, G. (2016). Variation in reactivity predicts cooperative restraint training efficiency. Journal of the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science, 55(1), 41-49.
  • Bliss-Moreau, E., Moadab, G., Bauman, M. D. & Amaral, D. G. (2013). The impact of early amygdala damage on juvenile rhesus macaque social behavior. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 25, 2124-2140. 
  • Bliss-Moreau, E., Machado, C.J., & Amaral, D.G. (2013). Macaque cardiac physiology is sensitive to the valence of passively viewed sensory stimuli.  PLoS One, 8(8), e71170.

Awards

Chinese-American Kavli Frontiers of Science Symposium Participant 2016
Visiting Research Fellowship, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia 2014
“Rising Star” Award, Association for Psychological Science 2013
Excellence in Postdoctoral Research Award, University of California, Davis 2013