Dr. Purcell received a PhD in Clinical Psychology and Neuroscience from Indiana University in 2022 following completion of clinical internship at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System. His research characterizes the imbalance between cognitive processes underlying the perception of risk/uncertainty and positive valence systems subserving reward-seeking in psychosis-spectrum and affective disorders. His work has characterized this deficit across behavioral risk-taking tasks and identified aberrations in associated networks of brain regions (e.g., nucleus accumbens, insula, anterior cingulate cortex) using functional imaging in clinical and non-clinical samples.
Within CANL, his research examines the neural circuits subserving reward anticipation and pre-emptive loss-aversion (i.e., insurance) within non-clinical samples. He is also investigating the attentional processes undergirding information gathering prior to decision-making, and the effectiveness of cognitive strategies to ameliorate disadvantageous decision-making and upregulate adaptive reward-related brain activation in psychosis. Dr. Purcell additionally provides psychological assessments for those with 3q29 microdeletion syndrome, and their families, through the Rutgers Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine.