Neir Eshel

Biography

Dr. Neir Eshel is a research-track psychiatry resident at Stanford Hospital, pursuing a career at the interface of research and clinical practice. He is interested in how we learn about rewards and punishments, how we make decisions based on this knowledge, and how these systems break down in neuropsychiatric disease. Before arriving at Stanford, he earned an MD/PhD at Harvard Medical School, where he used optogenetic, electrophysiologic, and behavioral approaches to probe the neural circuit regulating dopamine release.

Research Interest

His goal was to provide insight into how dopamine normally functions during reward learning, and how this process might go wrong in neuropsychiatric disease. Prior to that, he conducted research at the National Institutes of Health, Princeton University, the World Health Organization, and University College London, exploring the development of reward processing over adolescence, the computational strategies they use to simplify decisions, and the neural circuit that underlies these processes in both mice and humans.