Patricia Janak

About

Patricia Janak, Ph.D., is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University with joint appointments in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and in the Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She received her BA in psychology and biology from Rutgers College and earned her Ph.D. in biological psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. Following postdoctoral positions at the Wake Forest School of Medicine and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, she joined the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at the University of California, San Francisco, as an Assistant Professor in 1999. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2006 and was named the Howard J. Weinberger Endowed Chair in Addiction Research at UCSF in 2011. In 2014, she transitioned to Johns Hopkins University to continue her research and academic career. Her work focuses on addiction research, and she leads the Janak Lab, which investigates neural mechanisms underlying addiction and reward-related behaviors.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Artificial Intelligence
• Machine Learning
• Biology
• Medicine
• Chemistry
• Internal medicine
• Biochemistry

Selected publications

• A quantitative reward prediction error signal in the ventral pallidum

  Nature Neuroscience · 2020 · 106 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Consolidating the Circuit Model for Addiction

  Annual Review of Neuroscience · 2021 · 82 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Addiction is a disease characterized by compulsive drug seeking and consumption observed in 20-30% of users. An addicted individual will favor drug reward over natural rewards, despite major negative consequences. Mechanistic research on rodents modeling core components of the disease has identified altered synaptic transmission as the functional substrate of pathological behavior. While the initial version of a circuit model for addiction focused on early drug adaptive behaviors observed in all…

  DOI

• From Prediction to Action: Dissociable Roles of Ventral Tegmental Area and Substantia Nigra Dopamine Neurons in Instrumental Reinforcement

  Journal of Neuroscience · 2023 · 33 citations

  Dopamine neurons in the midbrain are essential for learning, motivation, and movement. Here we describe in detail the ability of VTA and SNc dopamine neurons to generate instrumental reinforcement, a process where an agent learns about actions they can emit to earn reward. While rats will avidly work and learn to respond for activation of VTA and SNc dopamine neurons, we find that only VTA dopamine neurons imbue actions and their associated cues with motivational value that spur continued pursui…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Mesostriatal dopamine is sensitive to changes in specific cue-reward contingencies

  Science Advances · 2024-05-29 · 31 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Learning causal relationships relies on understanding how often one event precedes another. To investigate how dopamine neuron activity and neurotransmitter release change when a retrospective relationship is degraded for a specific pair of events, we used outcome-selective Pavlovian contingency degradation in rats. Conditioned responding was attenuated for the cue-reward contingency that was degraded, as was dopamine neuron activity in the midbrain and dopamine release in the ventral striatum i…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Contextual cues facilitate dynamic value encoding in the mesolimbic dopamine system

  Current Biology · 2025-01-23 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Amygdala neural circuits in alcohol intake

  NIH · $2.1M · 2019–2025

• NIH Grant R03DA024363

  NIH · $369k · 2010

• NIH Grant R01AA014925

  NIH · $3.6M · 2016

Frequent coauthors

• Laia Castell

  Johns Hopkins University

  126 shared

• Giuseppe Gangarossa

  Unit of Functional and Adaptive Biology

  118 shared

• Marcelo Rubinstein

  Experimental Medicine and Biology Institute

  116 shared

• Pauline Tarot

  Université de Montpellier

  116 shared

• Laura Cutando

  Inserm

  116 shared

• Ha-Rang Kim

  Université Paris Cité

  112 shared

• Valentine Le Gall

  Université de Montpellier

  112 shared

• Daniel Jercog

  Neurocentre Magendie

  112 shared

Similar researchers at Johns Hopkins University

• Richard Huganirh-210
• Michela Gallagherh-104
• James Knierimh-73