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At home on a couch with her dog curled up beside her, Brooke Bender describes a life that mixes curiosity, craft, and close community. Raised in Chardon, Ohio, she values connection and experimentation: from knitting and embroidery to 3D printing and cooking, these hobbies feed the same creative instincts she brings to her work. The personal side of her story also includes a lifelong love of horses and regular yoga, habits that help sustain the stamina required by academic life.
Professionally Brooke describes herself as someone driven to understand why people behave the way they do. She pairs a love of teaching with a laboratory career, and she emphasizes how scientific inquiry is fundamentally creative: framing questions, designing clever experiments under constraints, and translating results into stories that matter. Those twin passions — educating undergraduates and investigating brain mechanisms — structure much of what she does daily.
Research focus: decisions, stress, and the addicted brain
Brooke’s research centers on the neuroscience of choice, especially why individuals make decisions that harm their long-term well-being. Her primary focus is on substance use disorders and the neural circuits that underlie compulsive behavior. The motivating question is deceptively simple: what drives us to choose short-term reward over long-term health? To explore that, she examines how drugs and stress alter synaptic function and behavioral strategies in animal models, seeking mechanisms that might explain vulnerability and resilience.
Why animal models?
Working with rats provides experimental control and access to brain changes that are difficult to measure in people. Brooke explains that the organization of key brain regions is conserved across mammals, which makes rodent studies powerful for probing circuit-level hypotheses. Using these models she correlates behavior with cellular and network alterations, allowing causal tests of ideas about how stress or drug exposure shifts decision-making processes.
Key scientific questions
Her investigations ask how repeated drug exposure reshapes reward processing and how prior stress exposure modifies susceptibility to maladaptive choices. In the lab she combines behavioral assays with neurobiological measurements to map when and where circuits diverge in animals that develop harmful patterns. The ultimate aim is to highlight targets for interventions and to refine how we think about prevention and recovery.
Teaching through SPIRE and balancing dual roles
Brooke is a postdoctoral fellow in the SPIRE program, an initiative historically funded by the IRACDA mechanism to support postdocs who want research and classroom experience. SPIRE uniquely pairs laboratory training with semester-long teaching at partner schools, and at UNC it has long-standing relationships with institutions such as North Carolina Central University and North Carolina A&T. Those partnerships appealed to Brooke because the program intentionally builds evidence-based pedagogy into postdoctoral training and creates teaching opportunities that many research-heavy postdocs otherwise cannot access.
Through SPIRE she taught an introductory biology class and a seminar-style course on the neurobiology of addiction at North Carolina A&T during the Spring and Fall semesters of 2026. Those courses forced her to refine how she communicates complex ideas: providing guided notes to maintain focus, using concrete examples to define expectations, and being mindful of campus rhythms — for instance, avoiding exams during major events like the university’s celebrated homecoming. To manage both lab and classroom she compartmentalized blocks of time and relied on collaborative lab culture and undergraduate researchers to keep projects moving.
Practical advice for postdocs
For postdocs seeking classroom experience Brooke recommends several pathways. securing independent funding (such as an F32 or T32) can create protected time for teaching; otherwise, guest lecturing, co-teaching, summer courses, or adjunct roles at nearby colleges are realistic options. She also points trainees to institutional resources like CIRTL and TIBBS, and to online pedagogy courses such as InstructSTEM, which helped her build confidence before teaching a full course. Her core advice is simple: communicate your goals to mentors and peers; opportunities often come from conversations.
Life in the Triangle and next steps
Outside the lab Brooke enjoys the Triangle’s music scene and local cafés — she names venues like Cat’s Cradle and favorites such as Lanza’s Cafe and Open Eye in Carrboro as places to read and write. She recommends local experiences that bring play into life, from Spring Haven Farm’s family-friendly activities to food trucks at Steel String Brewery at Pluck Farm. For special occasions she highlights a meal at Fearrington House Restaurant, and she still indulges in cultural comforts like following shows such as Survivor and listening to lighter podcasts like Normal Gossip.
Looking forward, Brooke has accepted a position as Lecturer in Neuroscience at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA, where she will be starting in July. She plans to center her time on classroom teaching, to expand course-based undergraduate research opportunities, and to mentor students in summer projects. Personally she aims to establish a stable home with a yard for her dog, keep riding horses, nurture creative hobbies, and travel more when the schedule allows.