Insights into Psychiatric Disease

Stephen A. Allsop PD ’16, PhD ’16 is a postdoc in the Tye Lab in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. Allsop studies neural circuits that are involved in social cognition—specifically, how we learn about our environment by observing the experiences of others—with the hope of gaining new insights into how areas of the brain can misfire during psychiatric disease. “The overall goal is [to] come up with treatments in which we can basically restore the quality of life to people who suffer from these debilitating diseases, like depression or autism or schizophrenia,” Allsop says.