Andrew Kesner is a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. David Lovinger's Laboratory for Integrative Neuroscience at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). His overarching scientific interest is in the neural mechanism of motivated behavior and how these mechanisms go awry in psychiatric disorders. He earned both his B.A. in Behavioral Biology (2012) and PhD in Biology (2018) from Johns Hopkins University. He performed his thesis research in the lab of Dr. Satoshi Ikemoto at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) as part of the NIH-Johns Hopkins Graduate Partnership Program, where he used optogenetics and in-vivo electrophysiology in awake, behaving mice to elucidate the roles of a novel brain reward system.
As a CCB Fellow, Andrew will study neural mechanisms mediating sleep disruption and other motivated behaviors resulting from withdrawal from THC, the main psychoactive substance in marijuana. He has formed collaborations with colleagues within his home institute at NIAAA in addition to colleagues at NIDA and the National Institute on Mental Health (NIMH). Andrew is excited to be a CCB Fellow and looks forward to furthering the CCB mission.