I study how interoceptive signals from the body remodel brainwide neural circuitry and representations to support learning and memory and promote long-lasting changes in behavior — with the goal of understanding the general principles for how learning and motivation algorithms are implemented in the brain and how these neural computations give rise to basic elements of human experience.

Currently: I am a postdoctoral fellow in Ilana Witten’s lab at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. My recent work addresses a long-standing mystery about learning from gut-to-brain signals: How is the brain able to associate flavors experienced during a meal with postingestive effects, like food poisoning, that arise minutes or hours later? We discovered that delayed malaise signals reactivate and strengthen the amygdala’s representation of flavors from a recent meal, which provides a neural mechanism to resolve the credit assignment problem in postingestive learning and shows how the common phrase we associate with unexpected nausea — “it must be something I ate” — is hard-wired into the brain.

Previously: I was a graduate student in Zachary Knight’s lab in the UCSF Department of Physiology. My thesis focused on the neural mechanisms that govern thirst and drinking behavior. We discovered that sensory signals originating throughout the body — including from the mouth, throat, and gut — converge onto individual “thirst neurons” in the forebrain during eating and drinking, which allows these cells to predict changes in hydration before they occur and adjust drinking preemptively. This, in turn, provides a neural explanation for long-enigmatic aspects of everyday human behavior, including the rapid speed of thirst satiation, the thirst-quenching power of oral cooling, and the prevalence of drinking during meals.