Zoe Guttman

Zoe graduated from New York University with a double major in Neural Science and Psychology, where she worked in the lab of Dr. Kenneth Carr, using molecular pharmacological techniques to investigate reward processes and the neurobiology of ingestive behavior in rodent models. Her work focused on the interaction between dopamine and insulin in the nucleus accumbens and culminated in an honors thesis entitled “Insulin’s role as a reward signal in the nucleus accumbens: how striatal insulin contributes to sensing caloric value”.

She is now a PhD student in Dr. Edythe London’s Laboratory of Molecular Neuroimaging at UCLA, where she uses neuroimaging and computational modeling to probe the neural correlates of value and dopamine function during intertemporal choice and decision-making under uncertainty. She is especially interested in the intersection of decision-making and addiction, and in using neuroeconomic techniques to investigate addiction as a set of disorders in which an evolutionarily beneficial, neurocomputational process becomes maladaptive.