Daniel F. Cardozo Pinto

I am a neuroscientist studying neural mechanisms of reward learning and their dysfunction in psychiatric disease. As a Harvard Junior Fellow, I work with Dr. Naoshige Uchida’s lab in the department of Molecular & Cell Biology investigating components of dopamine and serotonin signaling that become dysregulated in addiction.

Before coming to Harvard, I completed a Ph.D. in Neuroscience with Prof. Robert Malenka and postdoctoral work with Prof. Neir Eshel, both at Stanford University. My doctoral research pioneered new experimental strategies for the study of multiple neuromodulatory systems simultaneously and uncovered a long-hypothesized opponent relationship between dopamine and serotonin in the control of reward learning. My postdoctoral work then identified a circuit mechanism for this opponency – inverse regulation of striatal output pathways by dopamine and serotonin – and showed that experimentally perturbing dopamine-serotonin opponency enhances animals’ susceptibility to the behavioral effects of addictive drugs like cocaine.

This work was supported by fellowships from the National Science Foundation and Howard Hughes Medical Institute. It earned national and international recognition including Best Poster Awards at the 2022 meeting of the Dopamine Society and the 2023 Stanford Bio-X Symposium, 2025 Paper of the Year Awards from Stanford Wu Tsai Neuroscience Institute and the Colombian College of Neuroscientists, and the Harold M. Weintraub Award for outstanding achievement in graduate studies from the Fred Hutch Cancer Center.

Prior to that, I received a B.A. with a double major in Molecular & Cell Biology and Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. There, my research in Prof. Stephan Lammel’s lab uncovered organizational principles of the brain’s dopamine and serotonin systems. That work was supported by a scholarship from the Amgen Foundation and recognized with UC Berkeley’s I.L. Chaikoff award for excellence in neurobiology.

Along the way, I have also co-authored numerous additional studies examining the roles of dopamine, serotonin, and neuropeptides in addiction, decision making, social behavior, and autism spectrum disorder. My writing has appeared in Journal of Neuroscience and Nature Neuroscience, and my research is published in Nature Communications, Science Translational Medicine, Neuron, and Nature.