Amina Tbaba

Amina Tbaba is a 2025-29 Self Graduate Fellow pursuing a PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Kansas. She graduated from California State University, Long Beach with a bachelor's degree in Chemistry. Her current research examines how addiction and partner loss can alter top-down regulation of social motivation towards a partner, using the monogamous prairie vole as an animal model. Her work aims to highlight the role that adverse life events can play in shaping our most intimate social bonds by examining the interplay between stress, reward, and oxytocin systems. She is also working to develop new methods in computational ethology using machine learning and computer vision techniques to analyze animal behaviors. Her ultimate goal is to establish a lab that examines the developmental effects of early life stress and parental separation on social behavior, including the impacts of addiction on the family unit.

Mentor: Adam Smith, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Pharmacology and Toxicology.