Witten studies the mesolimbic pathway, with a focus on the striatal neural circuit mechanisms driving reward learning and decision making.
[1] During her first year at Princeton, Witten worked as a research assistant in the lab of Lee Merrill Silver, studying molecular biology and genetics.
[4] Her undergraduate honors thesis was titled “Testing for Metabolic Efficiency in the Neural Code of the Retina” and was awarded by the Department of Physics.
[5] Under the mentorship of Eric Knudsen, Witten explored the neurobiological mechanisms of attention and strategies of information processing in the central nervous system of owls.
[7] In Witten's early graduate work, she explored how a specific neural circuit in the barn owl predicts the location of motion auditory stimuli.
[7] Witten then became interested in exploring how the brain detects a singular object when it must integrate a variety of sensory stimuli and information from various channels.
[1] Witten started her lab at Princeton and was dedicated to exploring the neural circuits driving reward learning and decision making in rodent models.
[5] Witten also teaches many classes at Princeton and is a member of BRAIN CoGS (Circuits of Cognitive Systems), a 7-lab NIH funded project to understand how working memory function underlies decision making.
[14] In 2016, Witten and her team at Princeton published a paper looking at the distinct functions of different populations of midbrain dopamine neurons defined by their striatal target region.
[15] Though both subpopulations displayed reward-prediction error, Witten's findings show that distinct dopamine terminal input locations support specialization of function in the striatum.
In 2017, Witten and her team explored a unique subset of prelimbic (PL) cortical neurons implicated in social behavior that project to the nucleus accumbens (NAc), amygdala, and ventral tegmental area.