Department of Behavioral Neuroscience

This dissertation examines how TAAR1 functionality influences dorsal raphe serotonin neuron activity, glutamatergic inputs, and methamphetamine (MA) intake in mice with d [...]

The brain regulates nociceptive processing through descending projections from the brainstem to the spinal and trigeminal dorsal horns. This is accomplished through endog [...]

Maintaining healthy levels of physical activity (PA) is a noninvasive, clinically proven means of reducing the onset of >40 chronic diseases and may provide a strategy [...]

The nucleus accumbens plays a key role in guiding motivated behavior by integrating glutamate inputs, the major driver of neuronal activation, and dopamine (DA) inputs, a [...]

Psychosis is a hallmark of schizophrenia. It typically emerges in late adolescence and is associated with striatal dopamine abnormalities. Most genes implicated in the ri [...]

The etiology of adolescent internalizing psychopathology (e.g., anxiety and depression) is not yet fully understood, and for that reason it has been difficult to identify [...]

Schizophrenia (SCZ) is a complex neuropsychiatric disorder thought to arise from an interplay of environmental and genetic risk factors. The presentation of disease sympt [...]

Just over 20% of American adults suffer from chronic pain, making chronic pain one of the most significant health concerns affecting individuals in the United States. For [...]

Delay discounting describes how individuals tend to prefer smaller immediate rewards over larger delayed rewards, and high levels of discounting are predictive of various [...]

Impulsive behavior is associated with poor health outcomes and studies suggest a heritable component to impulsivity levels. Recent research has begun to identity genomic [...]