Research Assistant Professor

My primary interests concern the role of basal ganglia circuits in the learning, selection and performance of actions, and how such neural mechanisms are altered in psychiatric and neurological disorders such as drug addiction and Parkinson's Disease. My current studies use chronic electrophysiological recording in awake, freely-moving rats and transgenic mice. I examine how populations of neurons encode information and interact with one another, and how these neural representations are changed by learning experiences and by dopaminergic manipulations.