In today's food environment, where calorie-dense, highly palatable, and processed options are abundant, many people experience persistent drives to eat that can outpace physiological need, contributing to obesity and related cardiometabolic diseases. The lab of Dr. Ames Sutton Hickey (ASH Lab) investigates the neural circuits that normally integrate hunger, satiety, and reward and asks how obesogenic conditions reshape those circuits to promote maladaptive patterns, including overeating, altered food choice, and difficulty sustaining behavior change. 

In this seminar, Dr. Sutton Hickey will discuss how hunger circuits in the hypothalamus that normally encode energy need and motivate food seeking are altered in highly palatable diet environments, dependent on sex and diet options, suggesting that dietary diversity in animal models is a more translational approach to understanding food choice and the neural mechanisms of obesity.