Annie started her scientific career as an undergraduate research assistant in Ilene Bernstein’s lab and Paul Phillip’s lab at the University of Washington, where she worked on projects investigating the effect of adolescent alcohol exposure on risky decision-making and contributing neural correlates, specifically phasic dopaminergic activity using FSCV. She graduated magna cum laude with honors and distinction in Psychology with a focus in behavioral neuroscience. As a research technician in Paul Phillip’s lab at the University of Washington, she worked closely with Jeremy Clark to investigate the role of phasic dopamine activity in Pavlovian learning.
She earned her Ph.D. in Behavioral Neuroscience program in Kate Wassum’s lab in the UCLA Psychology Department. She initially began investigating into the role of phasic dopamine activity within the ventral striatum in action-performance (Collins et al., 2016). From there, she became interested in the interaction between mesolimbic dopamine and acetylcholine transmission in mediating the ability of reward-predictive stimuli to initiate and invigorate the performance of reward-seeking actions using FSCV, choline biosensing, chemo- and opto-genetic technology (Collins et al., 2016, Collins et al., 2019, Collins et al., 2020).
Starting September 2018, Annie joined Ben Saunders’ lab as a Postdoctoral Fellow in at the University of Minnesota. She is currently investigating the neural mechanisms mediating cocaine self-administration and cue-induced relapse using fiber photometry and optogenetics.
In her free time she enjoys the opera, writing science fiction, painting and sculpting.