Kenny Amaya

I earned my BA in Neuroscience with Honors from Dartmouth College in 2015 working with Dr. Kyle Smith in the Neuroscience of Reward and Action Lab. I continued on as a graduate student with Dr. Smith in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth where I earned my Ph.D. While working at Dartmouth, my work was largely centered around motivation and action and their neural bases. Specifically, I have studied how the incentive salience of a Pavlovian cue is sensitive to changes in outcome value, how cholinergic interneurons in the dorsolateral striatum contribute to action flexibility on an instrumental lever press task, and how neural activity dynamics in the central nucleus of the amygdala are shaped by habit formation. As a postdoc in the Maguire lab, I aim to further investigate the neural mechanisms underlying value learning while advancing my technical skills through the variety of techniques the Maguire lab employs.