Our Research
Circuit Endophenotypes of Depression and Addiction
One in five adults in the U.S. live with a mental illness. Treatment options are limited, not well understood, and often have unwanted secondary effects. Our laboratory focuses on understanding the circuit mechanisms underlying depression and addiction for development of better therapeutics.
Individual Variation in Reward Encoding
Individuals have different sensitivities to reward which affects their cost/benefit decision-making and predisposition to develop psychiatric disorders, such as depression and addiction. We are working to discover mechanisms of individual differences in reward encoding in the brain and how they affect behavior in rodents. We focus on inputs and outputs of the habenula, a phylogenetically old brain structure that processes reward and punishment and is involved in psychiatric disorders.
Learning from Reward and Punishment
How reward and punishment produce learned behavior is not well understood. We use 2-photon calcium imaging, in vivo and ex vivo electrophysiology, optogenetics, and single-cell transcriptomics in combination with carefully chosen behavioral assays to test hypotheses about the circuit mechanisms of motivated behavior.