I also spent quite a while participating in neurochemical research at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry (now the Center for Addiction and Mental Health)
The main focus of my work at the Clarke was investigating the pathogenesis of schizophrenia.  I also contributed to work on Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

After working at the Clarke I took a summer research job with Matthew Shapiro who is now at Mount Sinai studying hippocampal place cells.

I did my first rotation with Dr. Wendy Suzuki looking neural substrates of learning and memory. A recent Science paper described some new results about the role of the medial temporal lobe in learning.  

Currently, i am working in the lab of Dr. Joe LeDoux. When I first joined the lab I tried to record from the neurons of the central nucleus of the amygdala during fear conditioning. Fear conditioning is an excellent paradigm for studying learning and memory because you can easily and unambiguously create an association between two things (a neutral stimulus, like a tone, with an aversive stimulus like a shock) and study that association.

Now, as the first part of my dissertation I am studying representation, encoding, and processing.  I see the amygdala as a structure that plays an important role in decision making, especially when those decisions involve basic things like avoiding pain. There is an abundance of evidence that the amygdala does play an important role in these kinds of decisions, and i would like to try and find how the individual neurons of the amygdala contribute to this decision making.  By recording single-units from the amygdala while creating a conflict between appetitive drive and anxiety, I have shown that the lateral amygdala (LA) seems to be the neural substrate of anxiety.  When anxiety wins over appetitive drive neurons in LA fire rapidly compared to when the appetitive drive wins over anxiety.  This result together with other results from the lab (Repa, 2001) strongly argue that the 'decision' about whether a stimulus is aversive is made in the LA.  

I am interested in just about everything. I can usually find something interesting in even the most boring situation. For example, if i was at a play that was painfully boring and the acting was atrocious, i might just look around and see the reactions of other people to the situation. Unfortunately, they don't give out PhD's for that ... wait a sec, i could be an anthropologist.

So anyway, i've chosen neuroscience becuase it is one of the last frontiers of science and holds the key to all the mysteries of what it means to be human. That is to say, although the human body is different from a rat body, the working of the kidney, liver, heart, lungs, etc, are pretty much identical. The brain is a whole different story. Even our closest relatives, the great apes are far less sophisticated than us.

I use the word sophisticated with care. I would not claim that humanity is superior to any other species, but only humans have written language and have built things like telephones television, cars, rockets, and of coures, the internet. SO i think it's fair to say we are more sophisticated.

One of the things that seems unique to humans is the sense of self-awareness. What Daniel Dennet refers to as 'full-blown' consciousness. Closely tied to this is the fact that most of us have an identity, and ego, an idea of who whe are and who we are not. But what defines who we are?

Nature and Nurture.

I do believe that genetics does have a strong effect on our personality. But it's not a simple effect. It's fantastically complicated. It's so complicated that even when we have a full understanding of the human brain and development we will not be able to really predict the effect of genetics on personality. This may seem obviously true or obviously false to you. If this is obviously true, well i'm not going to preach to the choir. For those disbelievers, consider the following example:

Eye color, hair color, and skin color are very simple mendelian characteristics. However, depending on the culture you live in these properties influence the way other people treat you.  If you are the only blonde amongst brown haired folk or the only light skinned person amongst dark skinned folks then this will shape your personality in a way that is independent of any knowledge of the brain or genetics.

This example illustrates how a simple genetic trait interacts with environment in a very complicated way. As a career goal, i would like to contribute to the understanding of this process by studying how prior experience influences the salient features of current experience. In other words, how who we are affects who we become.

This is obviously a huge problem. One specific phenomena that i would like to investigate is that of state-dependant retrieval - mood affecting memory. For example, if you ever get in a fight (verbal) with someone, and they become very angry they often react to you as if they have access to a completely different set of knowledge than usual. This has been studied experimentally.

A more recent interest of mine is brain - computer interfaces.   Single-unit recording entails implanting wires into the brain.  These wires detect changes in local electric fields in the brain, in a sense, reading the 'mind' of the subject.  This information could be used to let an animal or person interact directly with a computer.  The other side of this is brain stimulation.  Cochlear implants are relatively common , and are an example of a common brain computer interface.  Optical implants are being developed and tested.   Someone with an optical implant could easily switch between a camera 'eye' and another source of visual input, like a DVD player or computer.

Innateness

Why are minor keys sad?  Why are people afraid of spiders? How, in general, does our DNA encode patterns of circuits that recognize stimuli in the outside world as emotionally relevant?
I find these questions fascinating.  But they seem too hard to tackle with the current state of knowledge.   There are people attempting to answe these questions by swapping out different parts of brains of different animals.....