Welcome to my website!  I am an M.D./Ph.D. candidate at Harvard Medical School pursuing my Ph.D. in Neuroscience with Professor Nao Uchida. For my thesis, I am using optogenetic, electrophysiologic, and behavioral approaches to probe the circuit regulating dopamine release. I hope my work will provide insight into how dopamine normally functions during reward learning, and how this process might go wrong in psychiatric disease.

I graduated from Princeton summa cum laude in 2007 with a degree in molecular biology and neuroscience. I then spent two years in London on a Marshall Scholarship, earning an MSc. in clinical neuroscience at University College London and conducting research at the interface of cognitive and computational neuroscience.

I am interested in how we learn about rewards and punishments and how we make decisions based on this knowledge. I have explored the development of reward processing over adolescence, the computational strategies we use to simplify decisions, and the neural circuit that underlies these processes in both mice and humans. 

Outside the lab, I enjoy playing clarinet in the Harvard Medical School Chamber Music Society and Longwood Symphony Orchestra (here are clips of the Flight of the Bumblebee and Brahms Trio) . I am also heavily involved in LGBT advocacy at Harvard Medical School.