Welcome to my website! I am a research-track psychiatry resident at Stanford Hospital, having graduated in 2016 from the M.D./Ph.D. program at Harvard Medical School. I earned my Ph.D. in Neuroscience with Professor Nao Uchida, using optogenetic, electrophysiologic, and behavioral approaches to probe the circuit regulating dopamine release. My goal was to provide insight into how dopamine normally functions during reward learning, and how this process might go wrong in neuropsychiatric 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. My previous mentors have included Danny Pine and Monique Ernst at NIH, Jon Cohen at Princeton, Jose Martines at the World Health Organization, Shirley Malcom at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Jon Driver and Jon Roiser at University College London.
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.