Talia N. Lerner, PhD, is an assistant professor of neuroscience and psychiatry & behavioral sciences at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Her lab studies the neural circuit basis of motivation, reward learning and habit formation using a variety of techniques including optogenetics, fiber photometry and electrophysiology. She is particularly interested in how individual variations in dopamine circuit function relate to differences in behavior and neuropsychiatric disease risk. Dr. Lerner is a recipient of the Janett Rosenberg Trubatch Award from the Society for Neuroscience and the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award. Dr. Lerner earned her BS in molecular biophysics and biochemistry from Yale University and her PhD in neuroscience from University of California, San Francisco. She completed postdoctoral training at Stanford University.