I am currently a fourth year psychiatry resident and Chief Resident of Research at the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to residency, I majored in physics at the University of Michigan and then fell in love with psychiatry while doing neuroimaging research of schizophrenia at the NIH. After joining the MD/PhD program at the University of Pittsburgh, I completed my PhD in neuroscience where I used in vitro electrophysiology and computer modeling to study the neural circuits of olfaction.
Now in my last year of residenzcy, my time is split between an interventional psychiatry clinic and research in the labs of Susanne Ahmari at the University of Pittsburgh and Eric Yttri at Carnegie Mellon University. The focus of my current and future research involves overcoming a major translational gap in psychiatry research: behavioral assays in rodents are rarely predictive of symptoms or disease processes in humans. My goal is to address this gap by developing computationally informed decision-making tasks that can be performed by both rodents and humans. To this end, I am currently developing a rodent version of the human “two-step” reinforcement learning task to study the neural circuits of the two parallel decision-making systems in the brain. One of these systems, the model-based system, is of particular interest in psychiatry because disruptions in this system are associated with OCD, eating disorders, and addiction. My long-term goal is to run an NIH funded lab that investigates the neurobiological mechanisms of anxiety and compulsive behavior using translatable mouse behavioral tasks, computational modeling, optogenetics, in vivo calcium imaging, and in vivo electrophysiology.