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 behavior (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 in preclinical models (Goode et al. 2026). 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!