Education:
BA Honour’s (Psychology w/ Minor Sociology) – Western University
MSc Psychology (w/ Collaborative Neuroscience Specialization) – University of Guelph
PhD Psychology – University of Guelph
Role in MouseTRAP: Research Associate – Neurobehavioural Specialist
E-mail: dpalmer9@uwo.ca
Website:
https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=BpZfPaEAAAAJ&hl=en
https://github.com/dpalmer9
Description of Research Projects:
My research within the TCN Lab and RoCRIC research group has been focused on the underlying neurobiology of complex decision making. I am interested in how structure such as the anterior cingulate and orbitofrontal cortex contribute to the evaluation of difficult or complex decisions. My projects utilize decision making tasks such as the rodent gambling task, pairwise discrimination, probabilistic reversal learning, as well as novel tasks of metacognition and object recognition memory. Throughout my research program, I have utilized several techniques including optogenetics and fiber photometry.
In my role as a Neurobehavioural Specialist, I am also responsible for developing novel data pipelines for the processing of large calcium imaging datasets with behaviour. I have also worked on automated pipelines for optogenetic experiments and more complex behavioural studies.
I am also a developer of TouchCog, a Python based touchscreen cognitive testing platform for the acceleration of cross-species translational neuroscience.