Talia Lerner, PhD

Talia Lerner is an Associate Professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Her lab studies the neural circuit basis of motivation, reinforcement learning, and decision-making with a focus on dopamine and basal ganglia circuit function. She is particularly interested in how individual variations in dopamine circuit function relate to differences in behavior and neuropsychiatric disease risk. Dr. Lerner earned her BS in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry from Yale University and her PhD in Neuroscience from UCSF. She completed postdoctoral training at Stanford University. Her awards include the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, the One Mind Rising Star Award, and the Janett Rosenberg Trubatch Award from the Society for Neuroscience.