Dr. Jocelyn Richard

The central goal of research in the Richard Lab is to understand the neural circuit mechanisms by which external cues and internal states act together to powerfully modulate motivated behaviors, including in models of alcohol use disorder. The researchers do this by measuring reward-related behaviors and measuring and manipulating neural activity in awake, behaving rats. Neural measurement techniques include in vivo electrophysiology to measure the spiking activity of many individual cells and fiber photometry for measurement of fluorescence from various genetically encoded sensors. These approaches can generate large, complex datasets. Many of the behaviors are measured using operant boxes or other automated behavioral measurement tools, but the group is also beginning to implement markerless pose estimation based on transfer learning with deep neural network (eDeepLabCut), and then using this pose estimation along with supervised machine learning to create predictive classifier of rodent behaviors (using Simple Behavioral Analysis - SimBA).