Brian Baldo

The primary focus of my research program is to understand how forebrain food-reward systems can usurp homeostatic controls over energy balance, potentially leading to binge eating and obesity. My laboratory employs a variety of neuropharmacological, neuroanatomical, and behavioral approaches to localize specific motivation functions to individual neural sites and circuits in rodent models and to determine the role of peptide transmission in these circuits. We are particularly interested in understanding how the frontal cortex controls reward-related circuits in the striatum and hypothalamus and to understand how dysregulation of these circuits generates maladaptive, dysregulated eating behavior.