I am a behavioral neuroscientist and computational biologist interested in how systems respond to perturbation: how what has happened to a system changes its structure and output.
As I began my graduate studies, drug overdose deaths in the United States were reaching historic levels. I turned that interest toward the neural basis of the comorbidity of post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction: why trauma and addiction so often become entangled, and why that entanglement can make both conditions harder to treat. My own view is that the answer lies less in self-medication than in what trauma does to the brain’s assignment of importance to cues of every kind, rewarding ones included.
My work combines preclinical behavioral models in genetically predisposed animals with molecular and computational analyses. I study how stress and learned cues alter behavior, and how those changes are encoded in the brain at the level of gene expression in specific brain regions.
I do this work as a postdoctoral fellow in the Lattal Lab at Oregon Health & Science University.