My lab is involved in creating novel behavioral and cognitive protocols to train standard laboratory rodents and African Gambian rats to detect target scents associated with explosive odorants using automated methods. We design computer-automated instrumental learning techniques in training rodent species to become efficient bio-detectors of explosives odorants or a wide range of hazardous chemical agents. The objective of this work is to create proven behavioral strategies that reduce the time frame for training rodents to reliably search for, identify and distinguish explosive and other harmful odorants from a number of distractor odors.

A separate interest of the lab involves understanding how physiological changes induced by emotionally arousing events, influences neural circuits in the brain to encode these experiences into memory more effectively. This question is approached with a battery of behavioral learning tasks, immunocytochemistry and neurochemistry to identify chemical transmitters that are released in the brain during learning to affect memory storage. The combined approaches are expected to reveal how meaningful or arousing events influence neural activity within the Amygdala, Prefrontal Cortex and Hippocampus to transform representations of everyday experiences into permanent memories.