Christopher Lafferty, Ph.D.

Christopher Lafferty is a postdoctoral researcher with György Buzsáki at the New York University Neuroscience Institute. He received his Ph.D. from McGill University under the supervision of Jonathan Britt.

During his doctoral studies, Lafferty used optical tools to record and manipulate the activity of basal ganglia circuits during decision making. He demonstrated that inhibition of behavioral responding is a function shared by multiple basal ganglia circuit elements, and that their patterned stimulation can disrupt behavioral inhibition in an enduring manner to drive compulsions. For this work, he was awarded the 2020 Jane Stewart Prize for outstanding graduate research paper by the Center for Studies in Behavioral Neurobiology.

His current work in the Buzsáki lab focuses on the link between sleep disturbances, hippocampal malfunction and memory consolidation. He records and manipulates the activity of reward circuits during periods of hippocampal synchrony (SPW-Rs) while mice are asleep and observe the resultant long-term behavioral changes and brain plasticity effects of such closed-loop perturbations.