Big news! I am beyond thrilled to announce that I’ll be starting my own lab as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC) in Jan 2027!
About UTHSC: The Goode Lab will be housed in the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology within the College of Medicine and the Neuroscience Institute at UTHSC. Located in the heart of Memphis’ Medical District, UTHSC is a public R1 research and medical university and part of Tennessee’s flagship university system. UTHSC is rapidly growing and making major investments in neuroscience (with additional faculty hires on the horizon)—the Goode Lab is excited to be a part of this momentum! UTHSC maintains state-of-the-art research cores in next-gen sequencing/bioinformatics, proteomics/mass spec, small-molecule detection/development, and more. UTHSC is further enriched by strong partnerships with its world-class neighbors, including St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Rhodes College, and the University of Memphis. Prospective graduate students can join the Goode Lab though the Neuroscience Track of the Biomedical Sciences Ph.D. Program. Trainees entering the Goode Lab can expect the highest quality of mentorship, scientific rigor, and collaboration across the department and UTHSC!
About Memphis: Recognized as the “Home of the Blues” and the “Birthplace of Rock n’ Roll,” Memphis offers a great balance of city amenities, small-town comforts, and genuine affordability. The city is celebrated for its incredible food, recreation, arts, history, and music scenes—you can eat award-winning Memphis BBQ, enjoy live music on iconic Beale Street, catch games at FedExForum or Autozone Park, hang out in the wonderfully bizarre Bass Pro Shops at the Pyramid, or visit the highly rated Memphis Zoo. Memphis sits directly along the Mississippi River and is home to the massive Shelby Farms Park and Overton Park, offering abundant green space, trails, and outdoor recreation. The city also enjoys easy access to fun neighboring destinations, including Nashville, the Ozarks, and Little Rock. Perhaps most importantly for prospective trainees: serious science is sustainable in Memphis. With a low cost of living and no state income tax, your graduate or postdoctoral stipend goes meaningfully further in Memphis than in most other major research cities. Many trainees and faculty live in vibrant and nearby neighborhoods like Harbor Town, Midtown/Cooper-Young, and East Memphis, as well as neighboring towns like Bartlett, Collierville, and Germantown.
RESEARCH OVERVIEW
Nearly half of all people will experience a mental illness at some point in their lives (NIMH). Newer, improved, and more accessible therapies depend on greater insights into the neurobiological bases of learning, memory, and emotion.
Through its ability to transform experiences into distinct, reactivatable patterns of neural activity, the hippocampus (HPC) supports episodic memory, spatial navigation, and emotional regulation (Goode & Tanaka et al. 2020). HPC dysfunction is implicated in a range of psychiatric and neurological disorders (Maren et al. 2013)—making it a critical target for understanding what goes wrong in mental illness.
How are HPC signals routed to subcortical structures for calibration of adaptive and motivated behaviors? The lateral septum (LS) is uniquely positioned to answer this: it receives convergent input from across the entire HPC (Rizzi-Wise & Wang 2021) and, in turn, broadcasts neuropeptidergic and inhibitory signals to the hypothalamus and broader subcortex. This makes HPC-LS-subcortical interactions a compelling—and underexplored—substrate for motivated behaviors (Besnard & Leroy 2022).
Accordingly, my research program focuses on decoding the genetic, neuroanatomical, and functional organization of these circuits using modern molecular and circuit-level tools (Goode et al. 2026) in preclinical models of feeding, fear, and social behaviors. The goal: to uncover how HPC-LS interactions shape memory and motivation, how they go awry in disease, and how we might rescue their functions!
Stay tuned for additional updates, including about specific research projects, lab developments, and hiring!
Published Works (Click for Links):
My Profiles: LinkedIn | Harvard Catalyst | ORCiD | Bluesky | Twitter/X | Web of Science | Loop | ResearchGate | NeuroTree
(Disclaimer: I Do Not Speak For Any Employer Or Funding Agency; All Opinions My Own)