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We are generally interested in understanding how our brains process reward and aversion, whether in healthy subjects or in the context of neuropsychiatric disease.
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We focus our work on basal ganglia structures like the striatum and nucleus accumbens, or the ventral tegmental area (home of dopamine neurons)
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Some of the research questions we are interested in:
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(1) How does cellular diversity contribute to reward and aversion processing by individual brain regions ? e.g. input-output diversity, topographical diversity, transcriptomic diversity
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(2) How does abnormal development of the reward/aversion system impact the risk for adult neuropsychiatric phenotypes ?
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(3) What is the impact of Western nutrition (in particular high fat diets) or metabolic factors on the processing of rewards and aversion by our brains ?
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