I am interested in how choices are made between what we want and what is best for a given situation, which can often be drastically different, such as deciding between a sports car and minivan, or between a decadent desert and a bowl of fruit. Making proper choices depends on the ability to detect stimuli in the enviornment without being distracted, and choosing actions that result in the most valuable outcomes in the long run. Impulsivity, which is characterized by choosing actions that have immediate low-valued payoffs in lieu of other actions that have more valuable long term consequenses, is heightened in a number of pressing psychiatric dissorders such as schizophrenia and attention deficit hyperactivity dissorder. My primary interests are to understand the neurobiology which dopamine and other neuromodulatorys alter the dynamics of neural activity in neural circuits linking prefrontal cortex, nucleus accumbens and other limbic structures to regulate cognitive control involved in making economic choices. I am particularly interested in how this processing is disrupted by subtle alterations of neural processing associated with psychiatric dissorders and psychoactive drugs.

In vivo intracellular neural recordings
Whole-cell patch-clamp recordings in acute brain slices
Multichannel recordings in behaving ainmals
Immunohistochemistry and confocal imaging
Computational neuroscience

My undergraduate training was in chemical engineering. As a graduate student, I melded this training with probems in neurobiology by developing biophysically grounded computational models of neural function. As a postdoc, I have transitioned to primarily focus on experimental neuroelectrophysiology of corticomesolimbic processing in rats to study how distractibility and impulsivity emerge from the disruption of neural activity.