Samantha Scudder

Assistant Teaching Professor

Biography

Samantha Scudder completed her ScB in Neuroscience at Brown University in 2010 and her PhD in Neurosciences at UC San Diego in 2016. Her graduate work was funded by a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation. She pursued postdoctoral research at New York University and continued her research on the cellular and molecular consequences of drug use as a postdoctoral fellow at UC Santa Barbara, funded by a National Research Service Award (NRSA) from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. She was also selected as a SAGE Junior Fellow in 2019 and received a NARSAD Young Investigator Award from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF) in 2020. She was appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at CSU Dominguez Hills from 2022 to 2023 and joined
UCSB’s Psychological and Brain Sciences Department as an Assistant Teaching Professor in 2023.

Her teaching specialties include biopsychology, behavioral neuroscience, and psychopharmacology. In addition to continuing neurobiological research on the effects of alcohol consumption in rodent models, she is presently conducting pedagogical research on the impact of peer tutoring programs on undergraduate student success.