Originally broadcast at 10:45 a.m. ET Monday, August 15, 2022.

Abigail Marsh is a professor in the Department of Psychology and the Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience at Georgetown University, where her research is aimed at answering the questions: How do we understand what others think and feel? What drives us to help other people? What prevents us from harming them? An expert on both courage and fear, Marsh joins the Chautauqua Lecture Series to lend her perspective on a week centering “New Profiles in Courage.”

Marsh’s research uses functional and structural brain imaging, as well as behavioral, cognitive, genetic, and pharmacological techniques and comprises over 90 publications in journals that include Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Human Behaviour, American Journal of Psychiatry, and JAMA Psychiatry. Additionally, she is the author of The Fear Factor: How One Emotion Connects Altruists, Psychopaths, and Everyone In-Between. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR and The Chronicle of Higher Education. When CBS’ “60 Minutes” dedicated a fall 2021 segment to the neuroscience of heroism, Marsh's research was prominently featured.

Her research has received awards that include the Cozzarelli Prize for scientific excellence and originality from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, The S&R Kuno Award for Applied Science for the Social Good, and the Richard J. Wyatt Fellowship award for translational research from the NIMH. She serves on the advisory boards of the National Kidney Donation Organization and 1Day Sooner, and is the co-founder of Psychopathy Is. Marsh received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and conducted her post-doctoral research at the National Institute of Mental Health. She is the past-President of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society.

About Chautauqua Institution: Chautauqua Institution is a community on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in southwestern New York state that comes alive each summer with a unique mix of fine and performing arts, lectures, interfaith worship and programs, and recreational activities. As a community, we celebrate, encourage and study the arts and treat them as integral to all of learning, and we convene the critical conversations of the day to advance understanding through civil dialogue. CHQ Assembly is the online expression of Chautauqua Institution's mission.