How does it work?

How can we take advantage of what we know about how it works to make it work better?

These are my broadly stated questions about the human brain. I am interested in understanding more about brain function at multiple levels and I’m privileged to have the opportunity to study this as a PhD student in Alison Adcock’s motivated memory lab at Duke.

Memory is an ideal topic for multi-level inquiry as current knowledge about it spans from its cellular and molecular model, long term potentiation, to human encoding and retrieval processes.  I am specifically interested in its modulation by the dopaminergic system. For more information about dopamine and motivated memory, you may visit the neurochemistry section of our lab website.