During my graduate studies, the support I received from the T32 training grant helped me obtain critical preliminary data for my thesis project. These preliminary findings served as the springboard for a successful application for translational science fellowship at my home institution. Moreover, the data inspired a body of research that explored how brain signals associated with reward and rewardrelated learning were modulated by physiological state (hunger, satiety). My thesis research produced three first author papers that were published in The Journal of Neuroscience, The Journal of Neurochemistry, and The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Overall, the data showed that brain reward signals were dynamically and bi-directionally modulated by different hormonal factors associated with physiological state. I received the Outstanding Thesis Award from the University of Illinois Chicago, which recognized my dissertation as the best from all Life Sciences across the entire university for that year. Following completion of my Ph.D. training, I pursued my postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. John Maunsell at The University of Chicago. As a post doc, my work has centered on a fundamental question in systems neuroscience, that is, how does the brain decode sensory information from the activity of populations of neurons in visual cortex? To address this question, I train mice to perform challenging perceptual tasks at the limits of their sensory capabilities. In concert, I record neuronal activity with optical and/or electrophysiological approaches to understand how information about the task is represented by sensory neurons. I then make specific optogenetic perturbations of these same populations to perturb population activity. By causally linking the resultant changes in population responses with changes in task performance, I can infer the neuronal responses that are most critical for perception. As part of a multi-lab collaboration, we are currently developing approaches to optogenetically perturb neuronal activity of individual neurons with high spatial and temporal precision in trained behaving mice (e.g., targeted two-photon optogenetic stimulation). This method will revolutionize our ability to causally link the activity of individual neurons with behavior and thus greatly enhance our understanding of basic brain function and how such functions are disrupted by disease. For this work, I was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation. In four years of postdoctoral training, I have published two manuscripts, with an additional two projects currently on going. I plan to being searching for a tenure track position at a major research university in the Fall of 2019.