Dr. Talia Lerner is a Senior Scientist and Scientific Director of Preclinical Neuroscience at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), and an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto.
She earned her Bachelor’s degree from Yale University and her PhD from the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF). She completed her postdoctoral training at Stanford University.
Dr. Lerner holds professional memberships with the Society for Neuroscience, the Canadian Association for Neuroscience, the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, the International Behavioral Neuroscience Society, and the Dopamine Society. She was the recipient of the 2024 One Mind Rising Star Award, the 2022 Janett Rosenberg Trubatch Award from the Society for Neuroscience, and the 2019 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, among other honours.
Areas of Research
The Lerner Lab studies how brain circuits involved in motivation, learning, and decision-making shape behavior, with a focus on dopamine and its role in mental health. The lab investigates how risk factors for psychiatric disorders, such as a history of stress or changes in hormones, can affect how people make decisions and how the brain responds to challenges. A key focus is understanding how the brain’s ability to learn from experience and predict what will happen – a valuable survival skill – can also contribute to vulnerability to psychiatric disorders. Using measures of brain cell communication and neural activity, along with tools that precisely control brain circuits, the lab studies how the brain adapts decision-making, depending on the current environment and internal body signals, to balance competing needs: seeking essential resources such as food and water while responding to and avoiding potential threats.
Publications
View Dr. Lerner's publications on Google Scholar.