Jocelyn M Richard PhD

Jocelyn Richard received her BA in psychobiology from Occidental College, where she worked in the lab of Nancy Dess studying risk-related feeding patterns and taste aversion learning. From there, she moved to Ann Arbor to complete her PhD at the University of Michigan in Kent Berridge's laboratory. While a graduate student, Jocelyn's work focused on nucleus accumbens circuitry involved in excessive eating and defensive reactions, as well as changes in hedonic impact, assessed via taste reactivity. For her initial postdoctoral work, Jocelyn joined the lab of Howard Fields at UC San Francisco, where she investigated neural encoding of cues and cue-elicited reward-seeking in the ventral pallidum. Jocelyn joined Patricia Janak's lab as a postdoc in January 2015. She is currently focused on dissecting the functional contributions of activity in ventral pallidal neurons and specific inputs to cue-elicited reward seeking, including in response to alcohol-predictive cues and following acute stress. She is particularly interested in how signals related to learned cue value, positive and negative affect, and physiological state are integrated in the ventral pallidum to generate cue-elicited behaviors. Currently, her work is supported by a NARSAD Young Investigator Award.