Rate My Professor Matt Roesch

Matthew R. Roesch is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and Director of the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program at the University of Maryland, College Park. He earned a B.S. with honors in Neuroscience, cum laude, from the University of Pittsburgh in 1997 and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the Department of Neuroscience and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at the University of Pittsburgh in 2004. His doctoral research in Dr. Carl Olson's laboratory examined neuronal activity in primate frontal and medial cortex during reward-based saccade tasks. Following graduation, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship on the Cellular and Integrative Neuroscience Post-Doctoral Training Grant in Dr. Geoffrey Schoenbaum's lab at the University of Maryland School of Medicine from 2004 to 2007, developing a novel choice task and expertise in behavioral electrophysiology and perturbation studies. He served as Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine from 2007 to 2009, then joined the University of Maryland, College Park as Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science in 2009, advancing to Associate Professor in 2013 and Full Professor in 2018.

Roesch's research elucidates neural mechanisms underlying learning, executive control, decision-making, and their disruptions in animal models of addiction, schizophrenia, and aging. He records single-unit activity, dopamine release via fast-scan cyclic voltammetry, and employs optogenetic manipulations as rats perform cognitive tasks including probabilistic reversal learning, delay discounting, stop-signal reaction time, set-shifting, and social paradigms. Notable findings include separate ventral striatum populations encoding value and motivation (PLoS One, 2013), phasic dopamine predicting approach-avoidance (Nature Communications, 2016), anterior cingulate signals for adaptive action changes (PNAS, 2020), and medial prefrontal lesions disrupting striatal action selection (Current Biology, 2022). With 90 publications, an h-index of 43, and over 9,500 citations (Google Scholar), his work has advanced knowledge of corticostriatal circuits in reinforcement learning and cognitive flexibility. Awards include the University of Maryland Distinguished Scholar-Teacher (2022), College of Behavioral and Social Sciences Excellence in Research (2018), Honors College Mentor of the Year (2013), and Outstanding Mentor (2017). He serves on the Brain Research editorial board (2021-2027), chairs faculty committees, and has mentored over 50 undergraduates, six graduate students, and four postdocs.