Christopher Lafferty, Ph.D.

Christopher Lafferty will be a postdoctoral researcher with György Buzsáki at the NYU Neuroscience Institute. He will complete his Ph.D. in August 2023 under the supervision of Jonathan Britt at McGill University.

During his doctoral studies, Lafferty used optical tools to record and manipulate the activity of basal ganglia circuits during decision making. He demonstrated that inhibition of behavioral responding is a function shared by multiple basal ganglia circuit elements, and that their patterned stimulation can disrupt behavioral inhibition in an enduring manner to drive compulsions. For this work, he was awarded the 2020 Jane Stewart Prize for outstanding graduate research paper by the Center for Studies in Behavioral Neurobiology.

His future work in the Buzsáki lab will focus on the link between sleep disturbances, hippocampal malfunction and memory consolidation. He plans to record and manipulate the activity of reward circuits during periods of hippocampal synchrony (SPW-Rs) while mice are asleep and observe the resultant long-term behavioral changes and brain plasticity effects of such closed-loop perturbations.