The Stanford Translational Addiction and Aggression Research Lab

We use cutting-edge neuroscience and computational tools to understand how the brain controls motivated behavior, and how this process might go wrong in psychiatric disease.

Research

As our name suggests, our research focuses on addiction, aggression, and the intersection between the two. Current questions include:

What is the economic value of dopamine release?
How do neuromodulators influence aggression?
What are the neural circuits of frustration?

To answer these questions, we pair the latest neuroscience methods (fiber photometry, optogenetics, electrophysiology) with carefully-controlled behaviors (operant conditioning, social interaction) and sophisticated analyses (economic demand curves, machine learning)