Affiliations

• Department of Pharmacology and Physiology
• Member, Central Nervous System Research Group

Research expertise

• Neuroscience and reward
• Addiction to drugs of abuse
• Schizophrenia and antipsychotic medications
• Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning

Main research projects

• Modeling the transition to cocaine addiction in the rat (CIHR)
• Amygdala circuitry and the response to cues that signal rewards (NSERC)

Approaches used

• Pavlovian and instrumental learning in rats
• Intravenous drug self-administration in rats
• Optogenetic manipulations in vivo (rat)
• Molecular biology (in situ hybridization, ELISA, western-blot)

Keywords

Addiction, Dopamine, Glutamate, Rat, Reward