Mary Baugh
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA·Neuroscience·Early-career
Why people with obesity make different food choices is usually framed as a question about willpower, but the brain circuits that learn from rewards may themselves work differently. Brain imaging and animal studies consistently find altered brain structure, connectivity, and reward responses in obesity, yet it remains unclear whether those differences translate into measurable changes in how people learn and decide.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Psychology
- Topics
obesity
insulin sensitivity
insulin resistance
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2030
What they work on
- Test whether excess adiposity and reduced insulin sensitivity weaken post-ingestive reward learning, using a flavor-nutrient learning paradigm in which a flavor is conditioned to the nutrients absorbed after swallowing.
- Determine how body fat and insulin sensitivity affect decision-making for food and non-food rewards, using probabilistic selection tasks in which participants learn which options pay off.
- Apply computational models of reinforcement learning to participants' choices to estimate learning parameters, and test whether these parameters vary with measures of glycemic control and insulin sensitivity.
- Build expertise in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study design, acquisition, and analysis to extend these behavioral findings to reward and decision-making brain regions.
More about the research
Adding to this, signals that arrive after eating — including insulin, the hormone that manages blood sugar — act on reward and decision-making regions of the brain, and reduced sensitivity to insulin may disturb how those regions regulate eating. Since obesity and insulin resistance usually occur together, and most insulin in the brain comes from the bloodstream, metabolic and neural explanations may be two halves of one mechanism.
Why it matters
Obesity and type 2 diabetes place a large burden on public health, and current treatments are not matched to individual biology. Linking insulin sensitivity to specific, quantifiable changes in reward learning and decision-making could help explain why eating behavior differs between people and may inform more individualized behavioral and pharmaceutical treatments for obesity and metabolic disease.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
William Mellick
Medical University of South Carolina, SC·Neuroscience·Early-career
Test whether parents with alcohol use disorder plus bipolar disorder and their unaffected teens show stronger brain responses to reward than AUD-only families, using fMRI during social reward and decision-making tasks.
Jasmin Cloutier
University of Delaware, DE·Psychology
Compare brain activity, measured with functional MRI, while people form first impressions of human versus artificial intelligence (AI) partners.
Anna Konova
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Neuroscience
Test whether experimentally induced craving shifts the brain's drug-specific value signals in 89 patients with opioid use disorder, using a value-based choice task during fMRI with craving and control sessions.
The school
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University: 35 labs on PI Pages, $657M a year on research, 496 research doctorates a year.
More about Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.