We are dedicated in understanding how the brain directs learning and motivation to guide the pursuit of rewards, and how neural circuits that evolved to serve this adaptive function contribute to maladaptive behaviors and affective states in psychiatric disease

Research Questions

• How are unconditioned and conditioned motivational states encoded and controlled?

• How do environmental cues acquire motivational power over reward seeking?

• How are individual differences in reward-related behaviors reflected in neural circuit activity patterns?

• What neural changes underlie shifts from normal to exaggerated motivational states that contribute to addiction and related diseases?

Research Methods

We specialize in a variety of state-of-the-art techniques for mapping, controlling, and measuring the activity of neural circuits. These approaches are integrated with rodent behavior conditioning paradigms of natural (i.e., food) reward and drug seeking.

• Optogenetics and other viral-mediated neural control approaches

• Calcium imaging (single photon) and fiber photometry

• Immunohistochemistry, viral-mediated circuit tracing, and related anatomical analyses

• Intracranial drug delivery

• Operant and Pavlovian behavioral conditioning procedures for food and intravenous drug rewards

• Deep-learning based methods for behavioral quantification