We know shockingly little about what goes on in a mother’s brain during pregnancy.

For example, we know only a handful of the hormones involved—out of hundreds scientists think may exist—and very little about how they might impact the brain. This gap in our understanding is one of the reasons we don’t have great treatments for pregnancy-related maladies, whether it’s extreme nausea, or anxiety and depression.

Closing this gap is the mission of the new Stanford Neuro-Pregnancy Initiative, part of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute's Big Ideas in Neuroscience Program.

Today on the show, we speak with initiative leaders Nirao Shah, a neuroscientist who studies sex differences in animal behavior, and Katrin Svensson is an expert in how our tissues use hormones to communicate in health and disease. Together with Longzhi Tan, an expert in gene regulation and 3d genome structure, the team aims to chart the cellular and molecular transformation that occurs in a mother's brain during pregnancy, in hopes of better understanding this fundamental event in a person's life and improving health outcomes for both mothers and infants.

Learn more:

Big Ideas in Neuroscience tackle brain science of everyday life and more (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2026)
Nirao Shah lab
Katrin Svensson lab
Longzhi Tan lab

References

Hoekzema, E., Barba-Müller, E., Pozzobon, C., ... Carmona, S., & Vilarroya, O. (2017). Pregnancy leads to long-lasting changes in human brain structure. Nature Neuroscience, 20(2), 287–296. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.4458 This is the landmark neuroimaging study discussed in the episode that provided the first evidence of long-lasting, pregnancy-induced changes in the structure of the human brain.
Fejzo, M., Sazonova, O., Sathira-Anuchit, S., ... & MacGibbon, K. (2023). GDF15 underlies nausea and vomiting of pregnancy. Nature, 624(7992), 639-646. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06921-9 This recent breakthrough paper provides strong evidence that the hormone GDF15 acts on the brainstem to cause nausea and vomiting in pregnancy.
Ishii, K. K., Osakada, T., Mori, H., & Shah, N. M. (2017). A Labeled-Line Hypothalamic Circuit for Intraspecific Social Behaviors. Cell, 171(3), 689-703.e15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2017.09.018 This is the work from Dr. Shah’s lab mentioned in the episode, identifying a specific circuit in the hypothalamus that changes its connectivity across the estrous cycle to control female mating behavior.

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Big Ideas in Neuroscience: A new neuroscience of pregnancy

From Our Neurons to Yours