Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Drug abuse is a major health issue, but we continue to lack long-term, effective treatments for addiction. This is due to a lack of understanding of how addictive drugs leave long-lasting changes in our brains. Drugs of abuse act in the brain by increasing dopamine release, which alters the connectivity of neural circuits that are responsible for reward processing. The nucleus accumbens is an important brain region for the learning and expression of reward behaviours, but the specific ways in which drugs of abuse alter circuit connections into and out of the nucleus accumbens remains unknown. The goal of my postdoctoral research is to examine how drugs of abuse change the connectivity of nucleus accumbens neurons to promote aberrant forms of drug seeking behaviour. The results of these experiments will give new insight into the mechanisms by which repeated exposure to drugs of abuse alter the brain and should inspire more targeted approaches for the treatment of addiction.