Anna Konova
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Neuroscience
Opioid use disorder (OUD) kills many people. Even with the best treatments available, many patients return to drug use.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
opioid use disorder
addiction
relapse
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through May 2031
What they work on
- 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.
- Identify the brain regions of a proposed 'craving circuit' that shift drug value, and compare drug craving with food craving in patients and 89 healthy controls to test whether the mechanism is specific to the drug.
- Test whether optimism bias, overestimating good outcomes under uncertainty, explains rising tolerance of ambiguity before opioid reuse, using choice and estimation tasks in patients, matched controls and an online MTurk sample.
- Map how optimistic brain representations of uncertainty drive risk-tolerant choices, using high-resolution fMRI, and follow patients over repeated sessions to link these measures to opioid reuse.
- Determine how menstrual-cycle changes in estradiol and progesterone alter reward valuation and dopamine-related prediction error signals, using hormone tracking, in-daily-life task assessments and dense repeated fMRI.
- Test whether hormone-driven changes in reward processing help explain sex differences in opioid use disorder diagnosis and treatment outcome in females receiving medications for OUD.
More about the research
Using a drug again is ultimately a decision. This research uses decision neuroscience, a field that blends psychology, economics and brain science, to find out why that choice tips toward opioids. It focuses on three things: craving, unrealistic optimism about uncertain outcomes, and monthly swings in sex hormones. The lab combines choice tasks, mathematical (computational) models of decision making, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which tracks brain activity through changes in blood flow. The goal is to find measurable brain and behavior targets for more personalized treatment.
Why it matters
Opioid reuse and relapse drive much of the illness and death in the opioid epidemic, and current medications often fail, especially for women. This work could give clinicians simple cognitive tests to monitor reuse risk in individual patients. It could identify brain-based treatment targets for craving and for overly optimistic risk-taking, and point to the best timing for intervention. It could also guide hormone-informed treatment choices and add-on therapies for women receiving medications for opioid use disorder.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
High-precision mapping of sex hormone modulation of reward value computations in opioid addiction
NIH · Aug 2026 – May 2031
Decision Neuroscience of Craving
NIH · Sep 2021 – Jun 2027
Computational psychiatry investigation of the role of unrealistic optimism in opioid use disorder and relapse
NIH · Mar 2021 – Dec 2026
Closest labs
Paul Regier
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Neuroscience·Early-career
Compare executive-function scores and prefrontal cortex activity, measured with fNIRS (light-based brain imaging), between people with opioid use disorder and healthy controls.
Emily Barkley-Levenson
Hofstra University, NY·Psychology
Test whether females aged 16-22 with restricting-type anorexia nervosa show greater aversion to ambiguous outcomes than matched healthy controls on a validated choice task that separates risky from ambiguous gambles.
Cecilia Hinojosa
University of New Mexico, NM·Neuroscience·Early-career
Define sex differences in reward-related brain circuitry, including the striatum, that relate to alcohol craving and drinking in trauma-exposed women and men, using functional neuroimaging.
The school
Rutgers University-New Brunswick: 57 labs on PI Pages, $837M a year on research, 713 research doctorates a year.
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