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Jane Taylor Yale School of Medicine, USA

Dr. Jane Rebecca Taylor is the Charles B.G., Murphy Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at Yale University School of Medicine and Yale University. She is an expert in behavioral neuroscience with interests in learning, memory, and motivational processes that relate to addiction, alcoholism, depression, stress and other psychiatric diseases. She received her undergraduate training at the University of Sussex and her graduate training with Professor Trevor W. Robbins at the University of Cambridge, UK. Since joining Yale and the Division of Molecular Psychiatry, her work has focused on the behavioral and molecular consequences of drugs of abuse on persistent brain alterations associated with cognition, learning and motivation. Dr. Taylor’s laboratory uses sophisticated behavioral analyses in rodents and monkeys combined with pharmacologic, optogenetic, viral, and molecular/cellular analyses. Her current research includes the use of animal models to investigate behavioral and computational processes regulating flexible decision making and memory reconsolidation processes to identify the dysfunctional neural plasticity mechanisms in orbitofrontal limbic-striatal circuits underlying pathophysiological states. The NIH and NARSAD have funded her research, and she has served on several NIH intramural and extramural boards and review committees, as well as editorial boards. She has published over 200 journal and review articles and has trained many post-doctoral students and mentored several graduate students. Her key influential findings have been on topics such as frontal-striatal decision-making, inhibitory control, habits, and behavioral flexibility, as well as on plasticity-associated cell adhesion and neurotrophin molecules, cAMP/PKA signaling in limbic cortico-striatal circuits and learning and motivation, and the impact of sex differences in addictions.