I originally became interested in neuroscience as a means to improve people’s lives. Ideally, all phenomena I study could have some degree of translational potential. As a result, neuropsychiatric disease processes, modeling, and treatment are of great interest to me. As a result, I collaborated with Alcino Silva at UCLA to determine how to best optimize preclinical drug development in neuropsychiatry using mouse models of neuropsychiatric disease.
I currently work jointly in Cory Root’s lab at UCSD. I study how certain information may be innately encoded into the structure of the brain, and how it could cause disease when defective. In other words: can we inherit things that our ancestors learned? If so, what happens when things go wrong? We study this question using a combination of cutting-edge techniques in behavior, molecular biology, genomics, and computational modeling and analysis.
I am a staunch supporter of open science, and try to incorporate it into my research and workflows wherever possible. All of my software, protocols, and experiments are available for free online under public licenses at GitHub, protocols.io, and Open Science Framework, respectively. I have made all of my publications (and their supplements) freely available here (see the link below), on ResearchGate, and on Zotero. My stable author identifiers and their associated metrics can be found at ORCiD, ResearcherID, and Google Scholar.