Arif A. Hamid, PHD

Arif Hamid, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Neuroscience and Hanna H. Gray Fellow at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, joined the University of Minnesota Medical School’s Medical Discovery Team (MDT) on Addiction Nov. 1. His laboratory will look at the underpinnings of the circuit mechanisms in the brain that help facilitate adaptive decision making and the ways in which the neurotransmitter dopamine affects motivation and learning.

Dr. Hamid completed his undergraduate degree at the U of M, where he was first exposed to neuroscience laboratories, and received his PhD in neuroscience from the University of Michigan. He was then a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University, where he was able to grow as an independent thinker and refine his research.

“I’d always been curious about how the brain coordinates how we behave as reasonable agents in the world,” Dr. Hamid said. “These questions have captivated my interest over the years, and they are what I study in my own laboratory now. To start, we will be building on my initial trajectory which asks a couple of really important questions which are, at the broadest level, what are the brain circuits that help us learn from, plan and execute goals? And, how do they interact physiologically to perform computations, or operations, in order to produce a range of behaviors that we call adaptive flexible behaviors?”

His laboratory uses cutting-edge methods to look inside the brain with high levels of precision. This research has many applications beyond the mere understanding of the neurocircuitry behind the ways in which we react and adapt to our environments. In deconstructing the human brain and understanding the different internal circuit connections, researchers can gain a deeper understanding of why addictions arise as well as other neurological or behavioral problems.

“There are a lot of direct connections between our mechanistic studies on the basic biology of how the decision-making system operates, and how, if those circuits break or misalign, you then generate a host of disorders that are very debilitating, such as substance abuse or psychiatric disorders,” Dr. Hamid said.

“Moreover, our experiments systematically test the predictions of computational models of decision making and behavior. Thus, by providing experimental evidence for the algorithms biological brains use to solve challenging problems, our studies are an important platform for the development of the next generation of biologically-inspired artificial intelligence,” Dr. Hamid said.