Dr. Baimel fostered an interest in reward and addiction, which led him to head west to pursue his PhD in Dr. Stephanie Borgland’s lab at The University of British Columbia, and then at The Hotchkiss Brain Institute at The University of Calgary. There, he examined orexin modulation of the ventral tegmental area, including its ability to alter the activity of different subsets of dopamine neurons. This inspired his interest in neural circuits, which he went on to study as a Postdoc with Dr. Adam Carter at New York University; where he used a combination of optogenetic, electrophysiological, and behavioural techniques to study neural circuits in the nucleus accumbens. He is now establishing these same techniques in his lab at Dalhousie University and aims to further define the neural circuits that underlie adaptative and maladaptive motivated behaviours.