Talia Lerner is associate professor of neuroscience and psychiatry & behavioral sciences at Northwestern University. She and her team use a wide range of technological approaches to dissect dopaminergic connectivity motifs and in-vivo activity patterns. Her lab seeks to understand how differences in dopaminergic signaling across striatal subregions influence individual differences in motivation and learning. Lerner and her team have a significant interest in understanding how such individual differences arise, especially in responses to stress. Identifying the precise circuitry underlying these variations in behavior will ultimately allow the Lerner Lab to identify principles of neural function that can be used to improve psychiatric treatments.Lerner earned her B.Sc. in molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University and her Ph.D. in neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco. Her graduate work in Anatol Kreitzer’s lab focused on understanding the molecular pathways that connect dopamine—as well as another neuromodulator, adenosine—to striatal synaptic plasticity. In particular, she identified a key signaling molecule, RGS4, that is required for dopamine and adenosine to influence synaptic plasticity in the striatum.
In her postdoctoral research with Karl Deisseroth at Stanford University, Lerner studied the regulation of dopamine release in specific basal ganglia subcircuits. She demonstrated that distinct information is transmitted by dopamine neurons projecting to different functional subregions of the striatum: the dorsomedial striatum (known for its role in goal-directed behavior) and the dorsolateral striatum ( known for its role in habitual responding). Recognizing that dopamine neurons projecting to these two subregions signal differently in vivo raises the question of how these different signals are generated and disseminated more generally, both across a wide range of behaviors and from individual to individual.
