Mara Mather wins NIH Career Award

Mara Mather receives a distinguished K award for career development from the National Institutes of Health.

Mara Mather, associate professor of gerontology and psychology, has received a 2009 K02 award from the National Institutes of Health.  K awards are a series of career development grants aimed at ensuring leading scientists have the available funding and time to address the nation’s most significant biomedical, behavioral and research needs.

The K02 award, given to newly independent scholars who demonstrate a need for a period of intense investigative focus, acknowledges the importance of Mather’s research on emotion and its effect on memory at different ages.  The prize will provide funding for five years of protected time, during which she will be free from obligations as an instructor to concentrate on advancing her research.

One of her main objectives is to receive training using imaging technologies, which is essential to help understand how emotional stress affects the structure and function of the brain. During the first six years of her career as a faculty member at a university campus without imaging facilities, her ability to examine neural correlations of mental processes was limited.  A major factor in her joining USC in the fall of 2007, she said, was the combination of aging and neuroscience research, unmatched by any other institution. 

“That I received this award is a testament to the resources available at USC in gerontology, neuroscience and neuroimaging,” Mather said. 

Between the USC Davis School of Gerontology and the Department of Psychology, there are 18 faculty members whose research primarily focuses on aging.  In addition, the neuroscience program has over 70 affiliated faculty members.

“This creates a community with an incredible depth and breadth of knowledge in issues related to the cognitive neuroscience of aging,” Mather said.  “Furthermore, the Brain and Creativity Institute founded by Antonio and Hanna Damasio brings together researchers with interests in the cognitive neuroscience of emotion and cognition.”

Mather described a series of courses, seminars, tutorials and other training objectives that will enable her lab to integrate the use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) into their research.  These include USC courses on neuroimaging methods taught by Professor Zhong-Lin Lu, tutorials in neuroanatomy by Professor Hanna Damasio, classes on the brain control of emotions and neuroanatomy by Professor Larry Swanson, and tutorials in Professor Richard Leahy’s lab on automated segmentation of brain images.

“I am very grateful to the world-renowned experts in structural anatomy and MRI data analysis, who were willing to share their expertise with me, as well as to Dean Gerald C. Davison and Chair Margaret Gatz, who supported my efforts in putting together the proposal,” Mather said.

Much of Mather’s research focuses on the positivity effect, one of her breakthroughs, with colleagues Laura Carstensen and Susan Charles, which found older adults favor positive information over negative information in their attention and memory.  Recently, she has focused on testing the hypothesis that the positivity effect is a result of older adults regulating their emotions rather than age-related decline in areas of the brain that detect negative information. 

“My lab members and I have found evidence that older adults use cognitive resources to help direct attention and memory in emotionally gratifying ways,” she said.  “In addition, we have found that older adults show no impairment in the automatic processes that help detect negative or threatening information in the environment.” 

Follow-up research made possible through the K02 award, will extend this line of research using MRI technology to analyze why the positivity effect reverses when older adults are distracted.  Another area of projected research follows up on a behavioral study using a driving game, which revealed that stress substantially decreased older adults’ subsequent risk taking.  Mather plans to use imaging technologies to examine brain mechanisms in response to stress and how these changes affect risky decision making in adults of different ages. 

The award, according to Dean Davison, “is yet another sign of distinction in her already illustrious career.”

“Mather is an outstanding scientist with a reputation for innovative work investigating aging, cognition and emotion,” said Lis Nielsen, Ph.D., of the National Institutes of Health.  Through the research opportunities provided by the K02 award, she will now gain expertise in data analyses using the latest MRI technologies.  I hope these skills will reveal new findings about functional networks of brain activity and the ways that emotion and stress affect cognition.”