Neuroscientist aims to decipher mechanisms that mediate dopamine’s role in brain and behavior

Ryunosuke Amo’s love of science began with bugs.

As a boy, he and a friend passed the hours collecting insects around their suburban Tokyo apartment and storing them in cages outside their rooms.

That interest bloomed into a fascination with biology, then neuroscience and the nervous system, especially the neurotransmitter dopamine and how it regulates behavior.

A rising brain researcher, Amo is assistant professor at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC and a member of both its Center for Neurobiology Research and Center for Human Neuroscience Research. He also holds a faculty appointment in Virginia Tech’s School of Neuroscience in the College of Science.

Amo’s broad research goal is to understand the mechanisms of dopamine’s diverse functions, which include a role in behaviors including movement, motivation, and learning. Dysfunction in the dopamine system is implicated in a range of psychiatric and neurological disorders including Parkinson’s disease, depression, and addiction. His research utilizes a diverse toolbox, including morphology, physiology, behavior, computational modeling, and molecular biology.

“His work is at the very frontier for contributing to accomplishing what neuroscience has been aspiring to for decades – rigorously connecting the biological and the computational processes that give rise to behavior into an integrated framework,” said Michael Friedlander, the research institute’s executive director and Virginia Tech’s vice president for health sciences and technology.

One of Amo’s specific research goals is to learn how opioids and other substances impact the dopamine system.

“How is the dopamine information coding disturbed in disease states?” he asked. “That includes addiction or opioid abuse. My research will uncover how dopamine signals are generated, how they are disturbed by opioids, and how these critical signals for behavior and cognition have been established through evolution.”

Amo’s previous research — done while a postdoctoral fellow and research associate in the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University— includes assessing a computational model of how dopamine-containing neurons generate learning signals. His findings filled the long-sought gap between machine learning theory and the biological brain. That discovery earned him the Young Investigators Award from the Japan Neuroscience Society in 2023.

Amo will collaborate with multiple faculty at the research institute, including Read Montague, Virginia Tech Carilion Vernon Mountcastle Research Professor, director of the research institute’s Center for Human Neuroscience, and a leading innovator in detecting and analyzing the signals of monoamine neurotransmitters. He hopes to work with Montague to identify similarities and differences between humans and animals, and to find new insights into both.

Amo also sees potential in working with other Fralin Biomedical Research Institute faculty, such as Alexandria DiFeliceantonio, who serves as the co-interim director of the institute’s Center for Health Behaviors Research, and is a leading investigator of the effects of ultra-processed foods on the brain. Appetite is related to the dopamine reward function, Amo said.