Jonathan Britt, Ph.D.

Jonathan Britt started the Britt Lab for Neural Circuits, Motivation, and Reinforcement Learning when he became an Assistant Professor at McGill University in 2014. Earlier in his career, Jon worked as a Research Fellow in the lab of Antonello Bonci at both UCSF (Gallo Center) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Baltimore. Jon earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in the lab of Dan McGehee. His introduction to neuroscience research began during his undergraduate studies at Colorado College under the mentorship of Bob Jacobs.

Jon is now an Associate Professor in McGill's Department of Psychology and holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Behavioural Neuroscience, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and renewed in 2025. He trains graduate students through the Department of Psychology and McGill's Integrated Program in Neuroscience, and is affiliated with the Center for Studies in Behavioral Neurobiology at Concordia University.

As a graduate student, Jon studied how presynaptic opioid and nicotinic receptors regulate dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens. As a postdoctoral fellow, he used optogenetics to compare the synaptic and behavioural profiles of hippocampal, amygdala and prefrontal inputs to the nucleus accumbens, work that set the direction of the Britt Lab. Since then the lab has shown how these inputs coordinate feeding, enhance food palatability, and suppress unproductive reward seeking, and how dopamine signalling maintains learned values and limits the duration of reinforced actions.