Associate Fellow
The John B. Pierce Laboratory

Associate Professor
of Neurobiology
Yale University School of Medicine

Laboratory:
Neural Basis of Value-Based Decision Making

E mail: laubach@jbpierce.org
Telephone: (203) 562-9901,
ext. 202

Education

AB, Lafayette College, 1989
MA, Bryn Mawr College, 1991
PhD, Wake Forest University, 1997

Biographical Sketch

Dr. Laubach has been at the John B. Pierce Laboratory since the summer of 2001. He obtained his PhD at Wake Forrest University in 1997, working with Dr. Donald Woodward's group on new methods for simultaneously recording from multiple electrode in the brain. He also worked on the neurophysiological basis of reaction-time performance and studied neuronal ensembles in the basal ganglia and frontal cortex. He continued that line of work as a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University from 1997-2001. There, he worked with Dr. Miguel Nicolelis' group in the Department of Neurobiology. At Duke, Dr. Laubach's research included studying the neuronal basis of motor learning, the role of distributed ensembles in tactile coding in the rodent and primate sensorimotor system, and the control of robotic devices with brain signals.

The goal of the Laubach Laboratory is to understand the role of the frontal cortex and basal ganglia in value-based decision making. We wish to understand how these regions of the brain learn predictive relationships between stimuli and outcomes (such as food detection and consumption) and control action selection. We are carrying out three lines of research related to this topic. First, we are studying how
errors influence neuronal activity to improve future task performance. Second, we are studying how the values of external stimuli are learned and flexibly tracked under changing environmental circumstances and how these aspects of stimuli and actions are mapped onto neuronal activity. Third, we are studying how working memory, based on persistent firing by neurons in the frontal cortex, is used to link together sequences of goal-directed actions. To study these issues, we use multi-electrode
recording methods in awake, behaving rodents, methods for reversible inactivating brain regions (e.g., fluorescent muscimol), and tract-tracing methods. We are also active in developing methods for quantifying how neuronal spike trains and population activity represent information about behavior and how spike trains relate to fluctuations in local field potentials.

The Laubach Laboratory is is supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Health and is a core group in the Swartz Initiative for Theoretical and Systems Neuroscience at Yale.