Ymchil

Diddordebau ymchwil

Current Research

Processing  and responding to rewards is an essential aspect of maintaining our health and wellbeing, as disruptions to reward processing can be seen across a range of neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders, including depression and dementia.
Maintaining normal reward processing involves an interaction of affective responses (hedonic experience, i.e. "pleasure"), cognition (e.g. learning appropriate representations of rewards in the environment), and motivation (e.g. the ability to alter responses to rewards based on current biological needs).

My PhD aims to isolate these three aspects of reward processing and elucidate the neurobiological substrates underpinning each of these separately. My aim is to increase our understanding of how individual symptoms of psychiatric disorders may arise from disruptions to reward processing.
To do this, I use a combination of behavioural assays of rodent behaviour, including the affective bias test (ABT) developed in Bristol University, microstructural analysis of consumption, and the effort-related choice paradigm. Using pharmacological manipulations and histological analyses, we can pinpoint the neurobiological substrates normally contributing to each individual aspect, to identify target areas and systems that may be involved in the development of specific psychiatric disturbances.

My research focuses on the effects of stress and the immune system on the development of anhedonia, amotivation and negative affective biases. Thus I use these behavioural assays to examine how pharmacological manipulators of stress and immune system pathways may cause reward processing deficits, and aim to investigate whether we can rescue these deficits by targeting neurobiological substrates identified through biochemical and histological analyses.

Funding

BBSRC SWBio DTP

Awarded a travel bursary for the  BNA 2019

Research group & collaborators

Behavioural Neuroscience

Professor Dominic Dwyer

Professor Emma Robinson (Bristol University)

Professor Mark Good

Past Experience

June - September 2017: Research Assistant, Brain Repair Group, Cardiff University.

September 2015 - June 2016: Professional Training Year, Brain Repair Group, Cardiff University.
Title: Optimising cell replacement therapy for rodent lesion models of Parkinson's disease.
- Experience using a combination of motor tests, immunohistochemical analyses, MRI and PET imaging to investigate functionality, survival and molecular characterisation of foetal-derived and embryonic stem cell-derived dopaminergic neuron transplants.

Dysgu

Postgraduate Tutor, School of Psychology (2018 - 2020):
Delivering tutorials to first year psychology undergraduates aiming to improve writing of practical reports.
Includes marking practical reports and exam scripts.

Laboratory Demonstrator, School of Biosciences (2017 - 2021):
Liver enzyme assays
Urea assays
Haemolysis
Muscle contraction
Practical skills measures

Marking of practical reports, School of Biosciences (2020-21):
Marking of reports relating to biochemical assays such as measurement of proteinuria in patient samples.

Traethawd ymchwil

Behavioural analysis of cognitive, motivational and hedonic aspects of reward processing.

Ffynhonnell ariannu

BBSRC SWBio DTP

Goruchwyliaeth

Cyhoeddiadau

• Date
• Type
• Selected