Abstract:
Dr. Kesner grew up in Saratoga Springs, New York. His overarching scientific interests are in the neural mechanisms of motivated behavior and how these mechanisms go awry in psychiatric disorders like addiction. He earned both his B.A. in Behavioral Biology (2012) and Ph.D. in Biology (2018) from Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Kesner performed his thesis research in the lab of Dr. Satoshi Ikemoto at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) as part of the NIH-Johns Hopkins Graduate Partnership Program, where he used optogenetics and in-vivo electrophysiology in awake, behaving mice to elucidate the roles of a novel brain reward system. Next, Dr. Kesner moved to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Dr. David Lovinger’s Laboratory for Integrative Neuroscience and soon after became a Fellow with the NIH Center on Compulsive Behavior. His Postdoctoral research focused on modeling cannabis withdrawal symptoms in mice, where he found that, like humans, mice experience profound sleep disturbance during withdrawal from d9-tetrahydocanabinol (THC). These findings open the door for preclinical research towards understanding the neural mechanisms of sleep disruption during withdrawal from misused substances, which turns out to be a major driver of relapse. In 2021, Dr. Kesner became the Chief of the Unit on Motivation and Arousal at NIAAA as part of the NIH Independent Research Scholar Program. He recently moved his lab to Indiana University – Indianapolis where he continues these research efforts. The mission of his lab is to use systems neuroscience approaches to understand how brain systems controlling motivated behaviors and sleep/arousal processes interact to drive maladaptive behaviors. Dr. Kesner is delighted to give the Gill Institute community an overview of his past and current research program in hopes to foster future inter-IU campus collaborations.