Our Current Staff

LUCAS DWIEL, PHD

POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW

Dr. Dwiel is a post-doctoral fellow in the Psychiatry Department in the Geisel School of Medicine and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire. Dr. Dwiel attended Indiana University Bloomington where he earned both a BS in Neuroscience and a BA in Philosophy before completing his PhD in Experimental and Molecular Medicine at Dartmouth College in 2021. Lucas’ long term research goal is to uncover the relationship between brain activity and neuropsychiatric disorders in order to develop better treatments for those disorders. Specifically, his interests lie in the pairing of electrophysiology and machine learning to determine which features of neural activity correspond to disorders or the behaviors/symptoms thereof. Neuromodulatory techniques, like deep brain stimulation, are the perfect tool to utilize this information as they function by directly altering brain activity and, when paired with machine learning based on electrophysiology, offer a great potential for personalized mental health care.

MORIAH MCGUIER, BS

GRADUATE STUDENT

Moriah is a doctoral student in the Integrative Neuroscience at Dartmouth Program (IND) at the Geisel School of Medicine, Dartmouth College. Moriah graduated with honors from Saint Vincent College with a BS in Biochemistry and a minor in BioPsychology before beginning her PhD at Dartmouth in 2020. Her undergraduate research focused on the dysregulation of kynurenine metabolism in schizophrenia, as well as improved detection of neurochemicals via square wave voltammetry and optimized carbon fiber electrodes. Her current research in the Doucette lab focuses on understanding PTSD-like symptomology in rats following a blast traumatic brain injury in hopes of enhancing current treatment for bTBI related PTSD.

MATTHEW COMPANY, BA, MS

GRADUATE STUDENT

Matthew is a doctoral student in the Integrative Neuroscience at Dartmouth (IND) program at the Geisel School of Medicine, Dartmouth College. He graduated with a BA in Psychology from California State Polytechnic University Pomona in 2018 and received his MS in Pharmaceutical Sciences in 2022 from Western University of Health Sciences. His previous work focused on the cognitive and behavioral consequences of chronic pain states and pharmacological intervention. In the Doucette lab, his work combines keypoint motion sequencing with neural recordings to identify distinct behavioral phenotypes in the delay-discounting task (DDT) and their corresponding neural signatures.  

ELISE BRAGG, BS, RLATG

LABORATORY MANAGER

Elise is a laboratory manager/senior laboratory assistant for the Doucette Lab. She holds a BS in Animal Science from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and an RLATG certification from the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science (AALAS). Elise became a research assistant/lab manager in 2011 in the Physiology and Neurobiology Department at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and then moved to the Psychiatry Department at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in 2017.

Undergraduate Students

Patience Mukundirukuri (Dartmouth, 25’)

William Sanders (Geisel School of Medicine)

Liam Coughlin (Dartmouth, 25’)

Jenny Medina (University of California, Irvine)