David Kupferschmidt, PhD.

Dave earned his Ph.D. in Psychology in 2012 from the University of Toronto, where he studied the neurochemistry of stress and relapse to drug seeking. During his postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. David Lovinger at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Dave combined neurophysiology with optical, viral, and transgenic tools to assess synaptic and circuit mechanisms of skill and habit learning. From 2017 to 2025, Dave served as Staff Scientist in the lab of NIMH Director, Dr. Joshua Gordon. There he led research into the neural circuit basis of cognitive functions such as working memory, and their dysfunction in mouse models of genetic susceptibility to neuropsychiatric disease. Dave is currently Senior Associate Scientist in Dr. Lee’s lab, where he studies how sensory evidence and expectation interact to shape the neural coding of adaptive motor plans.