Aubrey KellyAssistant Professor
Biography
Dr. Aubrey M. Kelly received her undergraduate degree in Psychology from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) in 2007. As an undergraduate, her research focused on examining courtship behavior in birds. During a gap year after graduating, she worked as a research assistant at UCSD examining grouping behavior in birds and social communication in honeybees (i.e., the birds and the bees). She then attended Indiana University for graduate school, completing her Ph.D. in Biology and Neuroscience, with a minor in Animal Behavior, in 2014.
Her graduate research examined the evolution of the neural mechanisms underlying social behavior in closely related finch species that vary in sociality, ranging from highly territorial to highly social phenotypes. Upon receipt of an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA Postdoctoral Fellowship, she joined the Psychology Department at Cornell University. As a postdoc, using the socially monogamous prairie vole, her research examined the development of social behavior and the social brain.
Dr. Kelly joined the faculty at Emory University in the Department of Psychology in August 2018.
Research
Research Interests
Neural mechanisms of social behavior; neuroplasticity; individual and species differences in behavior; development of the social brain; evolution of sociality.
Research Areas
Some of the primary questions addressed in the Kelly Lab include: What are the mechanisms underlying social behavior? How has social behavior evolved over time, and how have relevant neural circuits changed within and across species to allow for the extreme variation in social behavior we see today? What types of environmental influences have an impact on social behavior and the brain? How does social behavior develop over an individual’s lifetime, and how stable or plastic are social traits within an individual and/or species? To answer such questions, the lab uses an integrative approach and combines techniques from behavioral ecology, neuroendocrinology, developmental neurobiology, molecular biology, and genetics to study the mechanisms underlying social behavior.
The Kelly lab utilizes a comparative approach to understand social behavior. If we are to truly understand the evolution of social behavior, we need to consider the fact that various aspects of social behavior evolved independently many times. Thus, we cannot assume that relevant mechanisms have evolved similarly in all species. In order to build a solid foundation on which we study behavior and the underlying mechanisms, it is important to examine a diversity of species within and across taxa. Doing so will ultimately help us determine the fundamental neural principles associated with the organization of particular social behaviors and how they evolved in relation to the behavioral ecology of an organism. To this end, Dr. Kelly’s research examines the neural mechanisms that regulate social behavior in naturalistic contexts and across multiple social species from diverse phylogenetic taxa (e.g., estrildid finches, voles, African spiny mice, Mongolian gerbils).
Teaching
- PSYC 110: Introduction to Psychology I
- PSYC 385: Humans of Tomorrow: Integrating Technology with Humanity
- PSYC 543: Cognitive and Social Development
- PSYC 770R: Techniques in Mechanisms of Behavior
- PSYC 777R: Research Seminar A
Publications
