Meet Our Trainees

I am interested in how systematic biases in decision making promote drug relapse. Particularly, I am interested in how people with addictions’ beliefs about the negative outcomes of their drug use influence preventive behaviors to minimize these outcomes, a question I aim to pursue at the inter- as well as intra-individual level using a combination of behavioral experiments, neuroimaging, and experience sampling in a “real-world” population.

Main Mentor: Denise Hien, Ph.D.

Understanding the neurobiological mechanisms of known risk factors for alcohol use disorder (AUD) provides one avenue for developing potential therapeutics. Human clinical work indicates that the stimulant and sedative responses to alcohol represent risk factors for the development of AUD. Human neuroimaging studies and preclinical work both implicate the dorsal striatum as an important regulator of EtOH’s stimulant and sedative effects. I am currently using mouse models of alcohol-induced stimulation and sedation to explore the role of striatal astrocytes in modulating neuronal activity to produce these and other alcohol-related behaviors, such as home-cage alcohol drinking.

Main Mentor: Rafiq Huda, Ph.D.

My research focuses on the neurobiological and pharmacological mechanisms underlying motivational disorders, with a specific emphasis on eating behaviors. I investigate how neural circuits, particularly those involving the orexin system and sigma-1 receptors, regulate behaviors like binge eating and reward-driven food consumption. Using a combination of behavioral assays, neuroanatomical tracing, and operant conditioning, I explore how these circuits are influenced by high-fat diets and pharmacological interventions. My work also extends to understanding patient perceptions of pharmacotherapies for binge eating and weight management, blending preclinical and clinical research to inform the development of novel therapeutic strategies.

Main Mentor: Dr. Morgan H. James

Jahnayah is a graduate student in the Clinical Psychology PsyD program at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology (GSAPP). Her research interests include minority mental health, women’s health, health equity, and health promotion. Her current research has focused on black community health relating to substance use and trauma.

Main Mentor: Alexandria Bauer, Ph.D.

I am interested in examining how lifestyle factors, such as physical activity, stress, and diet, affect substance use and recovery from substance use disorders. Specifically, I aim to understand how these factors influence brain function, cognitive processes, and cardiovascular health, and how they ultimately shape substance use behaviors and contribute to relapse prevention.

Main Mentor: Jennifer Buckman

aia is a member of Dr. Danielle Dick’s Translational Psychiatric Genetics Lab, where her research focuses on the genetic influences on externalizing and substance use behaviors using deeply phenotyped, large-scale longitudinal datasets. She is also passionate about translating basic research findings into genetically informed prevention and intervention strategies.

Main Mentor: Danielle Dick, Ph.D. & Sarah Brislin, Ph.D.

My work centers on community-engaged research to address substance use among adolescents and young adults, with a special focus on individuals from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds. Building on my training in Motivational Interviewing and my prior experience adapting interventions for alcohol use to be used in group settings, my research aims to ensure that evidence-based treatments are culturally valid, relevant, and acceptable. I am especially interested in exploring how participants’ cultural backgrounds and experiences may influence treatment outcomes.

Main Mentor: Dr. Kristina Jackson

As a former public defender and psychologist-in-training, Tamina believes in utilizing a multidisciplinary approach to mitigate the adverse effects of an oppressive legal system to promote healing and repair on the individual, community, and systems levels. She aims to contribute practical tools and resources to those who have been disproportionately targeted by the inequities in the criminal justice system.

Main Mentor: Tanya Saraiya, Ph.D.

My research investigates the vulnerabilities and shared neurobiological mechanisms underlying compulsive eating and substance use disorders, focusing on the endocannabinoid, opioid, glutamatergic, and orexin systems. Using rodent models of voluntary cocaine self-administration and binge-like sucrose or saccharin intake, I demonstrated convergent transcriptional, epigenetic, and receptor-level adaptations in reward-related brain regions. I further explored the orexin/hypocretin system in addiction and palatable food intake to show that sugar or saccharin bingeing enhances cocaine demand in female rat. Overall, my work combines animal models, mechanistic molecular and epigenetic analyses, behavioral studies, and human genetics to define key.

Main Mentor: Gary Aston-Jones

Michael is interested in harm reduction and health disparities for people experiencing homelessness, specifically assessing and addressing substance use disorder-related morbidity and mortality for people experiencing chronic homelessness. His research to date has focused on medications for opioid use disorder programs and policy, peer interventions for people with substance use disorders, and overdose education and naloxone distribution program design. His dissertation focuses on the documentation of homelessness in Medicaid claims.

Main Mentor: Andrew Peterson, Ph.D.

I’m interested in combining tools from psychology, neuroscience, and economics to characterize how attention (and other cognitive processes) drive valuation of and craving for drug commodities in people with substance use disorders.

Main Mentor: Anna Konova, Ph.D.

My research interests center around the etiology, prevention, and treatment of mood and anxiety disorders, particularly where they intersect with substance use such as cigarette smoking. I am additionally interested in advancing the dissemination and implementation of evidence-based interventions for these disorders, with particular focus on addressing racial and ethnic inequities.

Main Mentor: Teresa Leyro, Ph.D.

My research focuses on the genetic and environmental influences on externalizing behaviors and related traits (e.g., callous-unemotional traits, irritability, delay discounting). As a developmental psychologist, I am particularly interested in leveraging person-centered, longitudinal models to unveil the developmental processes underlying these behaviors. My work aims to identify potential intervention points during childhood and adolescence, contributing to more effective strategies for prevention and intervention.

Main Mentor: Dr. Jill Rabinowitz

Andrew is a Ph.D. student whose research interests aim to impact the gap between the research and the clinical treatment of addictions. His interests are meant to generate clinically relevant measurements of relapse, harms, and recovery in addictions and across recovery goals for intervention research and program evaluation. His work is meant to further develop non-abstinence-based theoretical and conceptual frameworks of recovery. He hopes to leverage data science approaches such as Machine Learning and AI to bridge the gap. He has been a practicing clinician in addiction treatment in NJ since 2020. He has been an invited speaker on topics ranging from conditions in incarceration, reentry, and the stigma of addiction.

Main Mentor: Dr. Lia Nower, Ph.D.

Using methods of neuroeconomics and decision-making neuroscience, I study the behavior of human drug-addiction. Specifically, I focus on the longitudinal behavioral and neural changes that occur in people with opioid use disorder. I use value-based decision-making tasks to parameterize specific traits and states like riskiness, learning rate, and range adaptation. These can be used in turn with fMRI data to interpret the activity of key regions of interest like the ventral medial prefrontal cortex and the striatum.

Main Mentor: Anna Konova, Ph.D.

My research characterizes the imbalance between cognitive processes underlying the perception of risk/uncertainty and positive valence systems subserving maladaptive reward-seeking in psychosis-spectrum and affective disorders. This work has characterized this deficit across behavioral risk-taking tasks and identified aberrations in associated networks of brain regions (e.g., nucleus accumbens, insula, anterior cingulate cortex) using functional imaging in clinical and non-clinical samples.

Main Mentor: David Zald

In relation to addiction specifically, my research interests are focused on the perceptions and stigma on substance abuse disorders and drug use, and its impact on sentencing, treatment and policies. I am also interested in investigating the public perceptions on rehabilitation of defendants with substance abuse disorders and the levels of support for policies in the criminal-legal system such as problem solving courts.

Main Mentor: Colleen M. Berryessa, Ph.D.

Syed is currently working on his senior honors thesis under the supervision of Dr. Anna Konova & Ph.D. candidate Emmanuel E. Alvarez (RWJ). His honors thesis is focused on modeling the best way to think about updating in Optimism Bias within the context of an Ecological Momentary Assessment task and trying to understand how the different decision making parameters such as Risk Tolerance, Ambiguity Tolerance, Optimism Bias, & Delayed Discounting interact with each other in subjects who suffer from Opioid Use Disorder. In addition to work dedicated to his honors thesis, Syed is also involved in trying to computationally model Optimism Bias using a Bayesian and Reinforcement Learning approach.

Main Mentor: Anna Konova, Ph.D.

I study neural mechanisms of decisions that involve choosing a preferred option over others, known as economic decisions, which are compromised in individuals suffering from addiction disorders. I investigate mechanisms of economic decisions using local field potentials (LFP) of monkeys’ orbitofrontal cortex. I focus on LFP because 1) it can uncover mechanisms not evident in the neuronal spiking data, the typical way of exploring decision processes, and 2) it opens the possibility of translating rich animal electrophysiological findings to humans, as high-frequency LFPs are strongly related to the signals measured non-invasively in humans. My ultimate research aim is to bridge animal and human neurophysiological findings.

Main Mentor: Vincent B. McGinty, Ph.D.

As a trained developmental psychologist, I study substance use intervention and recovery in digital contexts, particularly among youth and young adults, integrating co-production with advanced computational and statistical approach. My work leverages AI, community engagement approach, and intensive longitudinal data to examine how digital interactions shape substance use and wellness.

Main Mentor: Dr. Kristina Jackson

I study perceptions, beliefs, and behaviors related to nicotine and tobacco. I’m particularly interested in designing and testing effective harm reduction communication for established adult smokers.

Main Mentor: Olivia Wackowski, Ph.D., MPH; Julia Chen-Sankey, Ph.D., MPP; Michelle Jeong, Ph.D.