Larry Young grew up on a small family farm in rural Georgia, where he spent his days with a pet possum (who rode on his head), catching catfish, and drag racing with his brother, Terry, and his cousin, Jerry. These early experiences engendered a love of animal biology that led to a Bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Georgia (1989) and a PhD in neuroendocrinology from the University of Texas at Austin (1994), where he studied parthenogenetic lizards (Anolis carolinensis) in the lab of David Crews. He returned to Georgia for a brief postdoctoral fellowship at Emory University School of Medicine with Thomas Insel and joined the faculty in 1996. The late 1990s saw him play an instrumental role in the founding of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience, an NSF-funded center, through which he mentored dozens of trainees from diverse backgrounds. He later became the head of the Division of Behavioral Neuroscience and Psychiatric Disorders as the William P. Timmie Professor of Psychiatry in 2007. In 2016, he also established the Center for Social Neural Networks in Tsukuba, Japan.
Modern comparative social neuroscience exists because of Larry’s contributions. He advocated for a simple idea: we need to use the right animal model for the question. Throughout his career, he leveraged the power of comparative biology to answer fundamental questions about social neuroscience. He is best known for his work with voles — small-eared rodents that have evolved many different social traits. By comparing monogamous prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster) with their promiscuous cousins, meadow voles (M. pennsylvanicus), Larry revealed how diversity in the genes that encode social neuropeptides and their receptors contributes to species and individual differences in behavior. He showed that complex behaviors were associated with specific expression patterns of oxytocin and vasopressin receptors in the brain1, a finding he substantiated by showing that manipulating the expression of a single gene (Avpr1a) in a single brain region could transform the social behavior of typically solitary meadow voles2. Discover magazine hailed the latter as one of the top 100 discoveries of 2004. He went on to show that variation in a repetitive DNA element in a non-coding regulatory region of Avpr1a contributed to diversity in brain expression patterns and social behavior3, providing an elegant mechanism by which natural selection could shape such a complex behavior. This idea was revolutionary at a time when most explanations for species-typical behavior focused on protein structure.
