Mitch examined the serotonin response to reward in the dorsomedial striatum using the GRAB-5-HT biosensor. He found that serotonin tracks the value of reward and can be modulated by subjective value. Interestingly, serotonin also rises in anticipation of reward, and also to a cue that predicts reward. Check out the paper, and also the highlight here.

We welcomed a new lab technician, Catherine Fengler, and two new undergraduates to the lab - Angela Shang '27 and Nina Prakesh '25 who will be working on her senior honors thesis.

Sixtine, a 3rd year PhD student in the lab, gave a wonderful talk on her work implicating the serotonin 1B receptor in the behavioral and neural response to psilocybin in mice. Then, she WON the Smitty Steven's Memorial Ski Race at the Winter Conference for Brain Research.

Congratulations to Stephanie who completed an amazing PhD thesis examining the behavioral and neural mechanisms of the effect of the serotonin 1B receptor in modulating impulsivity.  As the lab's first PhD student, we have so much to thank her for and will miss her very much! She will start a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Shelly Flagel at the University of Michigan. 

As an EE Just Undergraduate Fellow, Djemila started research in the lab during her sophomore year at Dartmouth. She completed an outstanding senior honors thesis which won the Brewster prize as well as the Benjamin Benner G. 1969 Award for Excellence in Research in Psychological and Brain Sciences.  She will join the laboratory of Dr. Alex Harris in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University. 

We are excited to start work on our new project exploring the role of serotonin in the adolescent maturation of impulsivity.

We're thankful we stayed happy and healthy this winter.

Thanks to Kai and Nina for their hard work this summer! The lab was able to start collecting data again and Nina and Selin were able to work remotely from across the pond!

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.24.059980v1 

All build instructions and code for the DIY-Nautiyal Arduino Modular Instrumental Condition (DIY-NAMIC) behavioral system are open-source at https://github.com/DIY-NAMICsystem

PhD student Stephanie Desrochers presents a poster at SfN.

We received a CompX Faculty Award to begin a new computational project in the lab.

The Nautiyal Lab is up and running in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College. Come visit us in Moore Hall!