Academic interests
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Substance use disorders – particularly in adolescents and young people
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The role of childhood adversity and other stressors in addiction vulnerability
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Novel pharmacologically-assisted psychotherapies
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Early preventions for drug use disorders
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Drug reward and pleasure
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The neurobiological underpinnings of addiction-related behaviours
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Recreational drug use
My expertise is in psychopharmacology and addiction research. I am interested in the acute and chronic effects of drugs on cognition, emotion and behaviour, and the corresponding neural underpinnings. I am also interested the translation of mechanistic research into searching for novel treatments for substance use disorders and mental health.
I completed a psychopharmacology-focused PhD at the University of Exeter (UK), where I examined the role of social risk factors/stressors in the onset and maintenance of opioid use disorders. I then moved to the University of Queensland (Australia) to develop and implement novel addiction treatments for young people. Together, my research has straddled both experimental and translational perspectives.
In my current position with the LABlab, we are aiming to understand how opioid stimulation and blockade impacts upon stress recovery and reward through acute administration and social support procedures. The findings will be critical in determining the role of endogenous opioids and dopamine for social and reward processing, and will provide the foundations to better understand an array of clinical disorders where these processes are disrupted.