Professor Kyle Smith awarded NIH grant

PBS Assistant Professor Kyle Smith has received a 5-year R01 research grant through the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health.  The grant will fund studies related to brain circuit mechanisms for reward cue attraction.  A core symptom in addiction is an excessive motivational reaction to environmental cues that have been associated with drug use. The proposed research will use state-of-the-art technologies to characterize brain mechanism by which such motivational value is added to environmental cues for rewards. Experiments will resolve long-standing questions about how the “reward network” of the brain functions as a circuit to control normal and excessive motivation.