When we sense danger around us, our brains switch on protective responses, like running or hiding, that help keep us alive. Just as important is learning from experience: noticing the signals that tell us we are safe again. When the brain gets stuck in alarm mode, or can’t learn that the danger has passed, fear lingers when it no longer serves us. This is at the heart of many conditions, including anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress, and schizophrenia.

Building on our recent publication (Williams et al., Mol Psychiatry, 2025), our lab is working to understand which brain circuits control how individuals react to threats, and how experience reshapes those reactions over time. We also study what goes wrong in individuals with high anxiety, pointing the way to better treatments.

To address these questions, we combine an integrated, multidisciplinary set of tools in rodents as a model organism. We use machine learning-based pose estimation to track multiple animals at once, allowing us to annotate and capture complex behaviors. We pair this with neural imaging across multiple brain regions and multiple animals, and with optogenetic tools that let us test, in real time, whether changing the activity of these circuits can reverse these behaviors.

From a circuit perspective, we use viral-mediated circuit tracing and genetically identified cell populations with defined transcriptomic profiles to map the potential mechanisms involved. Together, these approaches give us a full picture of how the brain controls these behaviors. 

By leveraging these tools to precisely target and understand brain circuits, our ultimate goal is to uncover mechanisms that are relevant to humans and to bring a translational perspective to our work, paving the way for new and more effective treatments for neurological and psychiatric disorders.