Peter M. Kaskan, Ph.D.

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).