Emily Baltz

• University of California, San Diego

Undergraduate research programs improve career outcomes for historically marginalized students in the US, but low retention rates in postgraduate research persist. As graduate students and postdocs, we present a combination of trainee-informed approaches for tailoring summer research programs to these students’ needs and share key materials to faci...

Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) can induce long lasting alterations to executive function. This includes altered action control, which can manifest as dysfunctional goal-directed control. Cortical and striatal circuits mediate goal-directed control over behavior, and prior research has found chronic alcohol disrupts these circuits. In particular, prior...

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) alters decision-making control over actions, but disruptions to the responsible neural circuit mechanisms are unclear. Premotor corticostriatal circuits are implicated in balancing goal-directed and habitual control over actions and show disruption in disorders with compulsive, inflexible behaviors, including AUD. However...

Dysfunctional decision-making has been observed in alcohol dependence. However, the specific underlying processes disrupted have yet to be identified. Important to goal-directed decision-making is one’s motivational state, which is used to update the value of actions. As ethanol dependence disrupts decision-making processes, we hypothesized that et...

Psychiatric disease often produces symptoms that have divergent effects on neural activity. For example, in drug dependence, dysfunctional value-based decision-making and compulsive-like actions have been linked to hypo- and hyper-activity of orbital frontal cortex (OFC)-basal ganglia circuits, respectively, however, the underlying mechanisms are u...

Psychiatric disease often produces symptoms that have divergent effects on neural activity. For example, in drug dependence, dysfunctional value-based decision-making and compulsive-like actions have been linked to hypo- and hyper-activity of orbital frontal cortex (OFC)-basal ganglia circuits, respectively, however, the underlying mechanisms are u...

AUTS2 was originally discovered as the gene disrupted by a translocation in human twins with Autism spectrum disorder, intellectual disability, and epilepsy. Since that initial finding, AUTS2-linked mutations and variants have been associated with a very broad array of neuropsychiatric disorders, suggesting that AUTS2 is required for fundamental st...

Recent hypotheses have posited that orbital frontal cortex (OFC) is important for using inferred consequences to guide behavior. Less clear is OFC's contribution to goal-directed or model-based behavior, where the decision to act is controlled by previous experience with the consequence or outcome. Investigating OFC's role in learning about changed...

Table 1: Effects of Strain on Responses Table 2: Comparison of Saline vs. CNO-treated Controls.

Addiction involves a predominance of habitual control mediated through action selection processes in dorsal striatum. Research has largely focused on neural mechanisms mediating a proposed progression from ventral to dorsal lateral striatal control in addiction. However, over reliance on habit striatal processes may also arise from reduced cortical...