About
Ryan Smith, Ph.D., is a principal investigator at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research and a research associate professor at the Oxley College of Health & Natural Sciences. He holds graduate degrees in neuroscience, philosophy and psychology. His lab focuses on understanding the neurocomputational mechanisms underlying emotion-cognition interactions and how they relate to brain-body interactions, with a special focus on information-seeking behavior, prospective planning and interoception. Lab projects also focus on how these mechanisms are affected in depression, anxiety and substance use disorders. The primary research methods used in the lab are neuroimaging and computational modeling, including a wide range of modeling approaches (e.g., drift-diffusion models, reinforcement learning models, active inference models). A major overarching focus is to characterize information processing differences between mentally healthy and unhealthy individuals with the goal of improving diagnosis and treatment selection within psychiatry and clinical psychology.
Education
- Ph.D., Psychology, University of Arizona
- M.A., Philosophy, University of Arizona
- M.S., Neuroscience, University of Arizona
- B.S., Psychology, Arizona State University
Research Interests & Areas of Expertise
- Cognitive neuroscience
- Computational modeling
- Emotion
- Interoception
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Substance use disorders
- Psychiatry
- Decision-making
