Lisha Shao, Assistant Professor of Biology, leads a group investigating the genetic and neural mechanisms of reward. She has received a $1.98 million R35 grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the mechanisms that underpin sexu​al reward in the brain of female Drosophila, which will advance our understanding of the rewarding aspect of matin​g behavior and provide novel insights into fundamental principles for the encoding and regulation of natural reward.​