Catherine Dulac

Catherine Dulac is a French-born American biologist. She is the Higgins Professor in Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University, where she served as department chair from 2007 to 2013. She is also an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She was born in 1963 in France. She came to the United States for her postdoctoral study in 1991. She is most notable for her research on the molecular biology of olfactory signaling in mammals, particularly including pheromones, and downstream brain circuits controlling sex-specific behaviors. She developed a novel screening strategy based on screening cDNA libraries from single neurons and a new method of cloning genes from single neurons. As a postdoc, Dulac discovered the first family of mammalian pheromone receptors when working in Nobel laureate Richard Axel's laboratory at Columbia University.

Dulac grew up in Montpellier, France, graduated from the École Normale Supérieure de la rue d'Ulm, Paris, and earned a Ph.D. in developmental biology from the University of Paris in 1991. She worked with Nicole Le Douarin on developmental biology, and carried out her postdoc studies with Richard Axel at Columbia University where she identified the first genes encoding mammalian pheromone receptors.

Dulac joined the faculty of Harvard Molecular and Cell Biology in 1996, She was promoted to associate professor in 2000 and full professor in 2001. She is currently an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and was the Chair of Harvard's Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology until 2013. She teaches three graduate level course including Molecular Basis of Behavior, Molecular and Cellular Biology of the Senses and Their Disorders, and Molecular and Developmental Biology Neurobiology.

Notable papers

• Wu, Z., Autry, A. E., Bergan, J. F., Watabe-Uchida, M., & Dulac, C. G. "Galanin neurons in the medial preoptic area govern parental behaviour." Nature, 509(7500), 325 (2014).
• Bergan, J. F., Ben-Shaul, Y., & Dulac, C. "Sex-specific processing of social cues in the medial amygdala." Elife, 3, e02743 (2014).
• Gregg, C., Zhang, J., Butler, J. E., Haig, D., & Dulac, C. "Sex-specific parent-of-origin allelic expression in the mouse brain." Science, 329(5992), 682-685 (2010).
• Kimchi T., Xu, J., and Dulac, C. "A Functional Circuit Underlying Male Sexual Behaviour in the Female Mouse Brain," Nature, v.448, pp. 1009–1014 (2007).
• Tietjen I, Rihel JM, Cao Y, Koentges G, Zakhary L, Dulac C. "Single-cell transcriptional analysis of neuronal progenitors.", Neuron, v.38, pp. 161–75 (2003).
• Pantages, E., and Dulac, C. "A New Family of Candidate Pheromone Receptors in Mammals," Neuron, v.28, pp. 835–845 (2000).
• Liman, E., Corey, D., and Dulac, C. "TRP2: A Candidate Transduction Channel for Mammalian Pheromone Sensory Signaling", PNAS, v.96, pp. 5791–5796 (1999).
• Belluscio, L., Koentges, G., Axel, R., and Dulac, C., "A Map of Pheromone Receptor Activation in the Mammalian Brain," Cell, v.97, pp. 209–220 (1999).
• Dulac C. and Axel R., "A Novel Family of Genes Encoding Putative Pheromone Receptors in Mammals," Cell, v.83, pp. 195–206 (1995).

Other

• Dulac, C. "Sex and the Single Splice," Cell, v.121, pp. 664–666 (2005).
• Dulac, C. and Grothe, B. "Editorial: Sensory Systems." Current Opinion in Neurobiology, v.14, pp. 403–406 (2004).
• Dulac, C. and Torello, A.T., Review, "Molecular Detection of Pheromone Signals in Mammals: From Genes to Behaviour." Nature Reviews Neuroscience, v. 4, pp. 1–13 (2003)
• Dulac, C. "The Physiology of Taste, Vintage 2000", Cell, v.100, pp. 607–610 (2000).

• 1998 Searle Scholar
• 2004 Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 2006 Richard Lounsbery Award
• 2007 Member, French Academy of Sciences
• 2015 Pradel Research Award by the National Academy of Sciences
• 2017 Scolnick Prize by the McGovern Institute
• 2019 Ralph W. Gerard Prize in Neuroscience

She was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019.