UC San Diego’s Center for Research on Empathy and Compassion proudly presents the Empathy & Compassion Research Speaker Series for Spring 2026.

This free virtual series highlights the impactful and groundbreaking research that Sanford Institute-affiliated faculty and researchers have played an integral role in. This series is designed for anyone with an interest in empathy and compassion in neurobiology and healthcare.

Why is palatable food so irresistible? Dr. Zhu will describe a neural circuit mechanism in which palatability actively suppresses a hindbrain brake, releasing dopamine signaling that sustains consumption. This moment-by-moment competition between reward and satiety systems explains why highly palatable foods drive overconsumption and why many obesity treatments fail once eating begins. Dr. Zhu will then extend this framework to social contexts, showing how observing others eat recruits the dopamine circuit to trigger socially cued eating, revealing a previously underappreciated social control of eating.

The hosting organization, T. Denny Sanford Institute of Empathy and Compassion, represents an unprecedented blending of two parallel themes: employing the unyielding rigor and tools of science to establish the neurological basis for empathy in the brain to identify the mechanisms that transform compassion from biology to behavior, and experimenting with and developing new ways to teach and instill empathy and compassion in clinicians currently practicing and in the teaching of future generations of health professionals.

Register here for this free online event. Please note, this event has been standardized to the Eastern Time Zone.