Saez Lab
Principal Investigator: Ignacio Saez
Institution: Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (New York, NY)
Primary Subfield: Computational Biology
Recruitment Status: Inquire for rotation/fellowship opportunities
Research Focus
Project Summary / Abstract Substance use disorders (SUD) are a major public health concern in the United States, with an estimated 40 million Americans struggling with at least one SUD in 2020. Despite the tremendous progress made in addiction neuroscience, there exists a major disconnect in our understanding of craving and addictive decision-making, which represent two key interacting features at the heart of all compulsive disorders. Addictive decision-making can directly lead to suboptimal outcomes for afflicted individuals and are frequently studied using value-based decision-making paradigms. Craving, in contrast, represents the highly subjective urge to ingest drugs and can persist even after long periods of abstinence. In laboratory studies, craving is often studied with cue reactivity paradigms; yet it is still debatable how cue reactivity paradigms relate to real-life cravings or addictive behaviors. As such, the overarching goal of this proposal is to identify the computational and neurophysiological mechanisms underlying the interplay between craving and decision-making, by leveraging recent advances in computational psychiatry and human intracranial neuroscience and usi…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01DA060220-02: Examining craving-choice interaction using computational modeling and intracranial recording (2026)
- 5R01MH124763-05: Invasive decoding and stimulation of altered reward computations in depression (2025)
- 1R01DA060220-01A1: Examining craving-choice interaction using computational modeling and intracranial recording (2025)
- 5R01MH124763-04: Invasive decoding and stimulation of altered reward computations in depression (2024)
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