Summer L Thompson, PhD, MS

Dr. Thompson’s research investigates integrative mechanisms underlying environmental influences on reward-related behaviors that are altered in neuropsychiatric conditions. She earned her PhD in 2017 in Neurobiology from the University Chicago, where she trained under Dr. Stephanie Dulawa. Her graduate work used models of compulsive-like behavior to investigate mechanisms and therapeutic targets. She received a travel award for this work. She then accepted a postdoctoral position in the laboratory of Dr. Jane Taylor in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University where she received training in operant and computational modeling approaches for the study of reward-driven behaviors that are altered in neuropsychiatric conditions including compulsive disorders and alcohol use.

In 2021, Dr. Thompson was promoted to Associate Research Scientist at Yale. She was then awarded a pathway to independence career development award from NIAAA (K99/R00) to study the role of the gut microbiota in alcohol use behaviors and decision making under the co-mentorship of Dr. Taylor and Dr. Noah Palm (Department of Immunobiology). She has received several additional awards for her work, including pilot awards from the Center for the Translational Neuroscience of Alcoholism and from the Yale/NIDA Neuroproteomics Core. Her ongoing and future research focus on the mediating role of the gut in environmental influences on reward-driven behaviors by integrating sophisticated behavioral paradigms, computational modeling and statistical analyses, and multi-organ molecular biology techniques including "omics" and bioinformatics.