Administrative Accomplishments

I have been active in the field of behavioral pharmacology (and division of ASPET) since graduate school. I served as an Executive Committee Student Counselor and an inaugural ASPET Washington Fellow. Throughout the course of my academic career I have organized multiple symposia for ASPET as well as other societies. Internally, I have organized multiple departmental retreats and serve on several departmental and institutional committees, including Graduate Admission Committees, and recent Chair of a department-established extramural Early Career Scientist selection committee focusing on promoting diversity in science.   

Research Areas

My research areas include behavioral, neuro- and translational pharmacology. My laboratory pairs operant behavioral and cognitive tasks with measures of brain function to aid understanding of CNS disorders and to develop novel pharmacotherapies for these conditions.  I have over a decade of experience conducting operant and non-operant behavioral paradigms including drug self-administration studies and cognitive assessments in rodents and nonhuman primates. Moreover, I have extensive experience evaluating brain function in rodent and nonhuman primate models of drug abuse and neuropsychiatric disorders using positron emission tomography (PET) imaging, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG). I also have experience examining how pharmacological manipulations with allosteric modulators as well as classic orthosteric ligands affect neurobiology and behavior (e.g. muscarinic and nicotinic acetylcholine, and glutamatergic receptor pharmacology), across preclinical behavioral models of substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and aging. My current research involves investigating subtype selective allosteric modulators targeting the metabotropic glutamate receptor system as treatments for various aspects of substance use disorder (stimulants and opioids) in rodents, employing both classic paradigms (drug self-administration and models of relapse) and sleep (longitudinal EEG) assessments during withdrawal and/or extended abstinence. 

ASPET Activities

• Division of Behavioral Pharmacology
  • Executive Committee Student Counselor (2009)
  • Graduate Student Poster Competition Judge (2013)
  • Washington Fellow (2013-2014)

Other Society Memberships/Activities

• International Pharmaco-electroencephalography Society (IPEG)
• College on Problems of Drug Dependence (CPDD)
• International Study Group Investigating Drugs as Reinforcers (ISGIDAR)
• Behavioral Pharmacology Society (BPS)
• American Psychological Association, Psychopharmacology and Substance Abuse Division
• Reviewer, Dissertation Research Award (2018-2021)