Dr. Caleb Browne is a scientist with the Brain Health Imaging Centre at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) and an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto.
Dr. Browne received his MA and PhD in Psychology from the University of Toronto, conducting research at CAMH while supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). He then continued his training through an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Neuroscience and Friedman Brain Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, where he transitioned to junior faculty as an instructor in 2022. In 2024, he returned to CAMH to lead preclinical research efforts in addiction neurobiology.
Dr. Browne’s research program is currently supported by the CAMH Discovery Fund and the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) John R. Evans Leaders Fund. While at Mount Sinai, his work was also supported through a Yale-NIDA Neuroproteomics Center Grant. His research has been featured in media outlets such as The New Scientist and Gizmodo, and he is a recipient of the Next Generation Award from the Canadian College of Neuropsychopharmacology recognizing outstanding early-career researchers.
Areas of Research
The Browne Lab investigates the neural basis of motivation and how dysfunctions in these processes contribute to addiction. A primary objective is to identify and reverse the persistent neurobiological changes that promote relapse vulnerability – a major barrier to effective treatment.
Research in the Browne lab is built on rigorous, multi-dimensional operant behavioral paradigms conducted in rodents to study the neural circuitry underlying motivated behavior in health and disease. A central approach is intravenous drug self-administration, which models key aspects of human drug-taking and relapse with high translational relevance. These behavioral models are integrated with techniques to monitor and manipulate brain activity in vivo (e.g., fiber photometry, two-photon calcium imaging, optogenetics, chemogenetics) and to examine molecular and genomic changes (e.g., multi-omic profiling, bioinformatics, and viral-mediated gene editing). This multidisciplinary strategy enables mechanistic insight into how the brain coordinates motivated behavior, how functional changes develop with drug exposure, and how these changes are stabilized over time through molecular restructuring of the brain’s reward circuitry. The overarching goal of work in the Browne Lab is to translate these insights into actionable treatment strategies by identifying novel molecular pathways and circuit-level targets for the prevention of relapse in addiction.
Current areas of focus include:
- Neural circuit mechanisms of motivation and addiction
- Epigenetic remodeling in substance use disorder
- Serotonergic regulation of motivated behavior
Publications
View Dr. Browne’s publications on Google Scholar.