Dr. Holly Sullivan-Toole, Ph.D.
Holly is a post-doctoral fellow in the CADEPP lab with broad interests in affective neuroscience, psychopathology, and adolescent development. Holly graduated from Winthrop University, South Carolina with a BA in psychology and philosophy, gained an interest in neuroscience while working as a research administrator in the Psychology Department at the University of Nottingham, worked as a post-bac at Rutgers-Newark, and completed her PhD through the Neuroscience track of Virginia Tech’s Translational Biology, Medicine, and Health program. To-date, her research has focused on themes of effort, perceived control, and reward processing, and she is interested in further understanding the neural underpinnings of these constructs and how they relate to anhedonia. As an NRSA post-doctoral fellow, Holly plans to study the developing reward-related phenotype in adolescents at different levels of risk for depression. More specifically, this work aims to better understand developing reward responsivity using (1) computational modeling to parse behavioral dimensions of reward response and (2) diffusion imaging methods to examine contributions of hierarchically maturing circuitry to reward response and the risk for depression.