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Peter M. Kaskan, Ph.D.

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Faculty Appointments

Biography

Professional Background

Dr. Kaskan joined the faculty of Neurological Surgery at Einstein College of Medicine in September 2020 after training in microelectrode recording techniques for targeting deep brain structures following his postdoctoral fellowship in the Laboratory of Neuropsychology at the National Institute of Mental Health.

There, he specialized in understanding the role of the amygdala in reward learning, attention, motivation, and value representation. Information relayed from the amygdala to visual cortex remains a long-standing interest. The role projections from the amygdala to the ventral striatum play in incentive salience and motivation is also a significant research interest.

In the department of Neurological Surgery at Einstein, Dr. Kaskan continues these lines of investigation through neurophysiological recordings in patients performing behavioral tasks in the operating room and epilepsy monitoring unit, and in parallel studies, in healthy human subjects.

Dr. Kaskan received his bachelor's degree from Clark University, and went on to study at Cornell University and RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Tokyo, Japan. He earned his Ph.D. in Psychology (Neuroscience) from Vanderbilt University, and completed his postdoctoral training at the National Institutes of Health, with partial support from a NARSAD Young Investigator Grant from the Brain and Behavior Foundation (2014).

Publications

Journal Articles

10/31/2022
Kaskan PM, Nicholas MA, Dean AM, Murray EA. "Attention to stimuli of learned versus innate biological value rely on separate neural systems." The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience.. 2022 Oct 31; Epub 2022 Oct 31.

1/1/2019
Kaskan PM, Dean AM, Nicholas MA, Mitz AR, Murray EA. "Gustatory responses in macaque monkeys revealed with fMRI: Comments on taste, taste preference, and internal state." NeuroImage.. 2019 Jan 1; 184:932-942. Epub 2018 Oct 03.

5/1/2017
Kaskan PM, Costa VD, Eaton HP, Zemskova JA, Mitz AR, Leopold DA, Ungerleider LG, Murray EA. "Learned Value Shapes Responses to Objects in Frontal and Ventral Stream Networks in Macaque Monkeys." Cerebral cortex.. 2017 May 1; 27(5):2739-2757.

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