Michael TreadwayThe focus of my research is the identification of neural circuitry underlying altered motivational states in psychopathology. The long-term goal of this work is to contribute to the development of a biologically-based classification of reward processing dysfunction in mental illness. To this end, my research employs behavioral measures of carefully translated preclinical paradigms with structural, functional and molecular neuroimaging methods to elucidate systems-level neurobehavioral markers of symptom phenotypes that are more homogenous in terms of etiology, pathology and treatment response. As part of this work, my graduate advisor, David Zald, and I developed the Effort-Expenditure for Rewards Task, a behavioral measure of willingness to work for rewards in humans. If you are interested in using this task, please email me at the address listed above.
