Amanda L Elton, Ph.D.

Dr. Amanda Elton received her undergraduate degree in neuroscience at The College of William and Mary. She underwent graduate training at Emory University, where she received a master’s degree in pharmacology, before heading to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences where she received her PhD in clinical and translational sciences.

Dr. Elton continued her scientific training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was awarded a K01 research career development award from NIAAA to study the neural correlates of risk for alcohol use disorder. Her research interests include elucidating the effects of early life stress, heritable risk, and substance on neurocognitive processes relevant for addiction and other forms of psychopathology using neuroimaging and behavioral methods.

Dr. Elton joined the department as an assistant professor. In her role, she will be conducting research in addiction science with a study of lifespan trajectories, psychiatric and medical comorbidities, and application of large data sets to inform science, practice and policy.

Dr. Elton’s research focuses on neurocognitive aspects of addiction such as discounting of delayed rewards, response inhibition, sustained attention, and attentional bias towards rewards and drug cues. By applying innovative functional neuroimaging techniques, she examines how individual differences in activity and connectivity of networks of interconnected brain regions supporting addiction-related behaviors promote or protect against addiction. She also has experience in evaluating effects of interventions on the brain and addiction-related behavioral metrics. She has used fMRI to investigate both brain functional changes and predictors of behavioral and pharmacological treatments for substance use. She also has experience using large, publicly-available neuroimaging data sets in her research, including the Human Connectome Project, ABIDE, and ADHD-200. Drawing from an extensive set of cutting-edge neuroimaging tools, Dr. Elton utilizes both classic and emerging methods in her research with the goal of producing findings that will guide treatment and prevention strategies for addiction.

Dr. Elton’s recent work includes longitudinal investigations of the neurocognitive mechanisms of risk and resilience for alcohol use disorder in emerging adults with a particular focus on early life stress and heritable factors. Her K01-funded research seeks to understand how childhood maltreatment, addiction family history, and genetics interact within the brain to produce vulnerability or resilience to alcohol use disorder and also how these effects differ between the sexes.

She also recently submitted an R01 to extend a series of findings linking attentional processes with resilience to alcohol misuse, which will combine fMRI, behavioral, and pharmacological investigations examining attentional deficits, attentional bias, craving, and longitudinal assessments of alcohol and other substance use. Dr. Elton has a strong interest in probing neurocognitive markers of addiction risk in the ABCD dataset to complement her related studies.

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