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Ilana Witten examines how drives to seek rewards, such as food, water, and social interactions, shape behaviors. Her research focuses on understanding whether animals learn that certain actions lead to rewards, how rewards influence decisions, and how the underlying circuitry is altered in disease states. Her decades of experimental and theoretical work have led to influential hypotheses regarding the striatum, a major hub of the reward circuit, which mediates various functions. However, due to technical limitations, rigorously testing these ideas has been challenging. By integrating a wide range of technical approaches, including optogenetics, rodent behavior studies, electrophysiology, imaging, and computational modeling, her lab is providing new insights into the circuit-level mechanisms underlying fundamental processes of reward and decision-making.
GRE scores are not accepted. Ph.D. is the primary degree; students are not required to hold an M.S.E. prior to admission.