People
Suzanne H. Mitchell, Ph.D.
Principal Investigator
Suzanne H. Mitchell, Ph.D., is a tenured Professor at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) in the Behavioral Neuroscience and Psychiatry departments and is a member of the Oregon Institute of Occupational Health Sciences.
She obtained her undergraduate degree at the University of Hull, England and her Ph.D. at SUNY-Stony Brook. Her thesis examined the economics of foraging behavior of rats, focusing on the role of the energetic costs and benefits in feeding. Her committee was chaired by Howard Rachlin, Ph.D., whose influence made her sensitive to the role of temporal costs as well as the energetic costs in determining the value of food rewards. During a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago, Dr. Mitchell worked with James P. Zacny Ph.D. and Harriet de Wit, Ph.D. focusing on using behavioral economics as an explanation for use of alcohol, cigarettes, and amphetamine in humans. During that time she also began collaborating with Jerry Richards, Ph.D., on delay discounting studies with rats.
Dr. Mitchell moved her lab to OHSU in 2001 from the University of New Hampshire to devote more time to research, particularly looking into why drug users tend to be more impulsive than non-drug users using human and animal models. Most recently she has returned to her earlier interests in energetic costs and her research has increased its scope to include effort-related decision-making in clinical populations. She has received funding from various NIH institutes (NHLBI, NIAAA, NIDA, NIMH), has served on several study sections as a member and as an ad hoc participant, and has received awards for education and mentoring. Currently she is the President of the Society for the Quantitative Analysis of Behavior, a Board Member for the Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior and coordinator of the Science Board for the Association of Behavioral Analysis.
Deborah Sevigny-Resetco
Graduate Student, Clinical Psychology Ph.D. Program
Deborah graduated from the University of Puget Sound with a B.A. in Psychology and a Neuroscience Emphasis. She spent years working in advocacy roles with individuals with severe mental health disorders, youth in the juvenile dependency system, and families enduring domestic violence. In 2018, Deborah joined the Translational Neuroeconomics Lab, researching reward valuation processes through various decision-making paradigms. Currently, she is a Clinical Psychology doctoral student, focusing on the cognitive and neurobiological impacts of trauma on decision-making patterns.
Aaron Brah
Graduate Student, Clinical Psychology Ph.D. Program
Aaron received his Bachelors of Psychological Science in 2016 from La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia and went on to work as a therapist and lecturer at Australia’s Malvern Private Hospital specializing in substance use interventions for individuals and families. In 2018, Aaron moved to Seattle where he pursued a Masters in Psychology at Seattle University. He was trained as an existential-phenomenological psychotherapist, worked at a residential substance use treatment facility and also as a research assistant at University of Washington’s (UW) Harm Reduction Research and Training (HaRRT) laboratory. There he studied patient-driven goal selection processes for individuals with alcohol use disorder in Seattle’s housing-crisis population.
Aaron then spent 2 years as a Research Coordinator at UW’s Department of Medicine, coordinating a multi-site, international R01 grant between Seattle, Atlanta, and Kenya. Aaron worked alongside a team of health economists, clinical psychologists, and epidemiologists to perform a Discrete Choice Experiment which sought to understand medical decision-making processes for people living with HIV (PLWH). Aaron will be conducting research on how past temporal discounting processes may impact impulsivity in those recovering from severe substance and alcohol use disorders.
In his free time, Aaron enjoys skateboarding, meditation, and playing with his Rottweiler-German Shepherd puppy.