Author: ericmgarr

I am a postdoctoral fellow in the department of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University, working in the lab of Patricia Janak.

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. I prefer my research to be hypothesis-driven.

To tackle these questions, I combined complex behavioral tasks in rodents with computational modeling, in vivo calcium imaging, optogenetics, chemogenetics, immunostaining, and retrograde tracing.