What We Study

We record from and perturb circuits in animals and construct detailed models of behavior to identify the computations that drive it. Through computational psychiatry, we apply the same models to human behavior to ask where these computations go wrong in disorders of mood and cognition such as OCD.

This work extends beyond neurons, including the role of astrocytes in learning from reward prediction errors.

We study the cortical, basal ganglia, and thalamic circuits that anticipate and value the resolution of uncertainty, measure information seeking in large human samples (including psychiatric populations), and build curious artificial agents, to uncover what makes us us.

We study how neuromodulators participate in learning in vivo, and we are starting to examine how sleep then reshapes memories. We use these principles to build brain-inspired networks that learn and forget flexibly and adaptively.

We study how prefrontal and hypothalamic circuits control the heart and, in collaboration with Dr. Hong Chen at Washington University in St. Louis, developed noninvasive, cell-type-specific ultrasound stimulation for nonhuman primates, as a first step toward targeted treatments for disrupted brain-body interactions in mood disorders.

We are continuing this work and building collaborations with the Johns Hopkins Department of Neurosurgery.