Dr. Talia Lerner

Dr. Lerner’s lab is redefining how we understand motivation and habit by revealing stress-sensitive dopamine circuits, paving the way for more targeted psychiatric interventions.

Dr. Talia Lerner is a neuroscientist and Principal Investigator at Northwestern University, where she leads a lab focused on the neural circuitry of motivation, learning, and individual differences in behavior. She earned her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from UCSF, where she identified RGS4 as a key signaling molecule linking dopamine and adenosine to striatal plasticity. As a postdoctoral researcher with Karl Deisseroth at Stanford, she demonstrated that dopamine neurons transmit distinct information to different striatal subregions involved in goal-directed versus habitual behavior. At Northwestern, her lab uses advanced tools to map dopaminergic connectivity and in vivo activity, with a particular focus on how stress and individual variability shape behavior and may inform new approaches to psychiatric treatment.