I am interested in the neurophysiology of reward valuation and decision making in the context of learning and memory. My current work is focused on better understanding how dopamine neurons encode value and economic utility. Though their role is well established in reward valuation, the means by which dopamine neurons give rise value estimations have not been fully elaborated. Further, the signals generated by dopamine neurons are not homogenous across different value scenarios and are subject to modulation in downstream target regions. My goal is to better understand what differentiable components of value and context give rise to the dynamic dopamine population code and how downstream modulation tunes these signals to update value estimates used to make decisions.
