The Team

Sam A. Golden, PhD

Associate Professor

Director, Undergraduate Program in Neuroscience

Ronald S. Howell Distinguished Faculty Fellow

Department of Neurobiology & Biophysics, Primary

Department of Anesthesiology & Pain Medicine, Adjunct

Sam received his BS in Neuroscience from Bates College (Lewiston, ME) in 2006, PhD in Neuroscience from the Icahn School of Medicine (New York City, NY) in 2015 under Dr. Scott J. Russo, and completed his Postdoctoral Fellowship at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (Baltimore, MD) in 2018 under Dr. Yavin Shaham. Sam joined the University of Washington Department of Biological Structure in 2019, with a co-appointment as a participating faculty in the UW Center of Excellence in Neurobiology of Addiction, Pain, and Emotion (NAPE). Sam's scientific interests encompass understanding the psychological and neural mechanisms guiding reward processing. He is particularly interested in understanding how neuropsychiatric disorders — such as maladaptive aggression, depression and substance abuse — subvert basic reward circuitry to manifest pathological behavior. Currently, he aims to better define the intersection of aggression and motivation, and identify the cellular and circuit mechanisms that control the transition from adaptive aggression to maladaptive aggression-seeking behavior.

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Carlee Toddes, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow (2022-present (co-mentored with Dr. Mitra Heshmati))

A postdoctoral research fellow specializing in the study of neural dynamics underlying pain-modulated social behavior. Carlee obtained her PhD from the University of Minnesota, where she conducted research in the Rothwell Lab investigating opioidergic mechanisms that underlie social affiliative behaviors. Beyond her laboratory work, she is deeply committed to promoting positive change in the scientific community through active involvement in science policy and advocacy.

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Todd Appleby, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow (2024-present)

Todd earned his PhD at the University of Washington in the labs of Drs. Mike Manookin and Fred Rieke, where he studied motion encoding in primate retinal ganglion cells. As a postdoctoral fellow in the Golden Lab, he combines visual and addiction neuroscience to understand how sensory circuits contribute to compulsive opioid seeking. Todd helped develop the lab's oral fentanyl self-administration procedure in mice, which he continues to refine as a tool for studying neural and autonomic responses to opioid-associated sensory cues.

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Zoya Hill-Sargizi

Graduate Student (Masters) (2026-present)

Zoya joined the Golden Lab as an undergraduate researcher while completing her B.S. in Bioengineering and has remained in the lab to continue her graduate studies. Her current work explores methods to integrate electrophysiological measurements with spatial transcriptomics to better understand how molecular states relate to neural activity. She is broadly interested in molecular engineering approaches and their application to understanding brain function, particularly in the context of addiction.

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