Matt Wanat, PhD
Associate Professor
Our actions are driven by the pursuit of rewards and avoiding aversive outcomes. We are particularly interested in studying how stress and drugs of abuse influence motivation, learning, and decision-making processes. The lab employs a number experimental techniques, including fiber photometry, chemogenetics, and optogenetics. Ongoing research projects are examining the behavioral consequences of astrocyte-neuron interactions in the midbrain, the long-term consequences of stress on reward-guided behavior, and the neural circuits involved with changing reward preference. Our ultimate goal is to identify and reverse neural adaptations underlying aberrant processes in models of psychiatric disorders.