Rosa Anna, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the lab of Antonello Bonci, National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), is a 2018 CCB Fellow focused on assessing brain circuits involved in homeostatic addictive behaviors, particularly compulsive feeding and reward. In addition to the mentorship of Roy Wise and Ross McDevitt, she is training with the guidance of the Ex vivo Electrophysiology Core (EVEC) in NIDA. Her contributions to the Core will both greatly advance her own training and allow her to get involved in multiple projects lead by other IRP investigators. Her long-term goal is to continue studying the neural aspects of behaviors that lie at the core of neuropsychiatric human diseases such as obesity and substance use disorders.
Rosa Anna got her Ph.D. in Neuroscience and Behavioral Disorders from the University of Palermo, but performed her research at NIDA. There, she focused on providing a targeted assessment of the behavioral, anatomical, and electrophysiological contributions of serotonergic and nonserotonergic dorsal raphe nucleus neurons to reward processes.