He received his PhD in the Department of Neuroscience and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at the University of Pittsburgh (working with Carl Olson). He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania (working with Laura Peoples) and the Medical University of South Carolina (working with Gary Aston-Jones), where he stayed on as a Research Assistant Professor until 2013. In his new position at UMass Amherst, he is working with a dynamic team of brilliant young scientists to investigate neural systems underlying motivation, learning, and decision-making. In his free time he enjoys data analysis, manuscript revisions, grant applications, and experimental design. Graduate Students