Christopher John Rozell
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Neuroscience
Why do some people lose the drive to work for rewards? This loss of motivation appears in major depression, Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia and other disorders, and it lowers patients' quality of life.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biomedical Engineering
Psychology
- Topics
effort-based decision-making
motivation
treatment-resistant depression
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2028
What they work on
- Develop the HORMES platform, built around a naturalistic effort-based decision-making task in immersive virtual reality that requires physical walking, and refine it with healthy participants and patients with major depression.
- Synchronize decision-making, body, emotional and clinical measures with recordings of relevant neural circuits, and analyze brain-body interactions using new latent variable models that uncover hidden patterns.
- Pilot HORMES in a longitudinal clinical trial of treatment-resistant depression patients receiving subcallosal cingulate cortex deep brain stimulation, using intracortical electrophysiology, direct recordings from inside the brain.
- Form a Council of Lived Experience Advocates of patients with intracranial implants to guide neuroethics research on high-resolution biobehavioral data.
More about the research
Researchers study it through effort-based decision-making (EBDM), choices about whether a reward is worth the effort. Most lab tests of EBDM are abstract, though, and may miss how the brain and body work together in real-world behavior.
Why it matters
A better understanding of motivational deficits could guide new treatments for symptoms such as low drive in treatment-resistant depression, Parkinson's disease and schizophrenia. The patient-advocate council may also help create best practices for the ethical use of high-resolution brain and behavioral data from people with brain implants.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Scott Wilke
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Neuroscience
Record how anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) neurons and ACC-to-nucleus accumbens projection neurons represent effort-related costs and benefits during choices, using miniature head-mounted microscopes in freely behaving animals.
Desmond Oathes
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Neuroscience
Establish that TMS targeted with resting-state fMRI connectivity modulates the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC), a deep mood-related region, using interleaved TMS/fMRI to record brain responses to stimulation.
Puja Parekh
University of Texas at Dallas, TX·Neuroscience·Early-career
Determine how two anterior cingulate cortex neuron groups, those projecting to the nucleus accumbens and those projecting to the insula, encode reward- and effort-predicting cues, using in vivo two-photon calcium imaging during an effort valuation task.
The school
Georgia Institute of Technology: 50 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 572 research doctorates a year.
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