Patricia Janak will give a virtual presentation on “Subcortical Brain Circuits Gate Motivation: Implications for Addiction” at 1:30 p.m. April 13. The seminar is free and open to the public.

Register for the Zoom link.

Reward-seeking behavior is shaped by current motivation and past learning about the nature of a given reward and how to acquire it. Neural mechanisms of learning and motivation both depend on a canonical “reward circuit” in the brain that includes ventral basal ganglia and amygdala. In this seminar, Janak will discuss current rodent laboratory studies that explore neural mediation of reward seeking, for both natural rewards and alcohol, by these circuits.

Janak is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University. She earned her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, and conducted postdoctoral research at the Wake Forest School of Medicine and the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Janak studies neural processes of reward learning, both under normal conditions and in animal models relevant to substance use disorders. Janak and her laboratory members have pioneered the development of rodent models of alcohol relapse and habitual responding and have made critical discoveries regarding neurochemical and neuroanatomical bases of alcohol intake and relapse.

This talk is sponsored by the Rural Drug Addiction Research Center, and it is an installment within their Seminar Series.