Patricia H. Janak, PhD

Administrative Accomplishments

I’ve been lucky to have administrative experiences that allowed me to discover my interest and skills in service. These include serving as Program Committee Chair for the 2019 annual meeting, as well as the multi-year commitment to serve on SfN council and chair the Committee on Committees after I was elected Secretary (2020-2024). These each gave me experience balancing and integrating input across multiple viewpoints to efficiently reach consensus and meet goals in order to serve the SfN community. 

At Hopkins, I have had the honor to co-direct the OneNeuro Initiative, a campus-wide effort for creating and strengthening interaction among neuroscientists strewn across multiple departments and campuses. Co-leading this initiative has been a great opportunity to think broadly about strategies to serve all areas of neuroscience at my university. I’m excited to consider how I can, in turn, think broadly about strategies to serve colleagues in neuroscience worldwide, should I be elected society president. 

Degree, Institute, Year Earned

Research Areas

Neurobiology of reward, associative learning, and addiction

Current Position(s) at Your Current Institution

• Bloomberg Distinguished Professor
  • Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences,
    Krieger School of Arts and Sciences
• Department of Neuroscience
  • Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
    Johns Hopkins University 

Memberships

Service Positions

Editorial Boards:

Other Service Positions:

Science Biography

I became interested in neuroscience as an undergraduate Psychology and Biology major at Rutgers University, inspired by the neuropsychopharmacology classes taught by George Wagner, and by my first taste of research in his lab, where I began a long-standing interest in the effects of drugs of abuse on behavior and the brain. In graduate school, I worked with Joe Martinez at UC Berkeley, where my interests intersected with a new focus on learning and memory. This led me to postdoctoral studies at Wake Forest University and the intramural research program at NIDA/NIH where I studied the electrophysiological correlates of drug and alcohol self-administration in rats. In 1999, I started my own laboratory at the Gallo Center at UCSF, a close-knit, stimulating environment that allowed me and my lab members to explore the neural basis of associative learning, including its pivotal role in drug and alcohol addiction. In 2014, I was honored to become a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University to continue this intersecting work of learning, reward, and addiction.

I and my laboratory members have pioneered the development of rat models of alcohol relapse and habitual responding and have made critical discoveries regarding neurochemical and neuroanatomical bases of alcohol intake and relapse. We have shown that cue- and context-mediated relapse depends on an interconnected neural circuit containing the amygdala and accumbens, with crucial contributions of VTA dopaminergic input, and that dorsal striatum is increasingly recruited during long-term alcohol use and shows dramatic changes in neurophysiology long after withdrawal. Our studies on the neurobiology of natural reward learning uncovered neural mechanisms for amygdala encoding of reward-predictive cues and revealed the complexities of amygdala valence encoding. We also showed that dopamine neuron activation during reward promotes conditioned responding to reward cues, providing some of the first causal evidence for dopamine’s participation in a reward prediction error-like signal. We have recently focused on how neural processing of reward leads to adaptation in limbic-striatal circuits controlling reward seeking, a question with implications for substance use and eating disorders.

None of the discoveries or advances made in my lab would have been possible without the enriching collaboration of outstanding and creative postdocs and students whose ideas continually define the course of our lab. Similarly, for my lab, and for all of us, the ideas and progress of our labs are enriched by the Society for Neuroscience through opportunities to learn from and share with one another. I am motivated to help shepherd our society in this era of substantial challenge to ensure that SfN benefits all our members to facilitate and support our important work in neuroscientific discovery and clinical application.

The full CV for this candidate can be found within the ballot.