I am a research scientist in the Unit on the Neural Computations in Learning at the National Institute of Mental Health, working with Angela Langdon.

The goal of my research is to understand how the brain changes during learning and how these changes impact adaptive and maladaptive decision-making. I am particularly interested in understanding how neural circuits in the brain learn to control movements during reinforcement learning—the process by which we learn to repeat sequences of actions that lead to rewards, including addictive drugs.

To tackle these questions, I combine complex behavioral tasks in rodents with in vivo fiber photometry, miniature microscope imaging, optogenetics, chemogenetics, immunostaining, and computational reinforcement learning models.