Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Substance abuse, which carries an enormous social and economical toll, continues to propagate at an alarming rate in Canada. Research has been relatively successful in understanding how drugs of abuse act on the brain to produce exaggerated reinforcement. The next challenge for researchers in the field of drug addiction is to identify the cellular and molecular neuroadaptations that characterize voluntary drug intake and the brain's transformation in addiction. Specifically, our research focuses on understanding the cellular changes, which underlie human addict's transition between habitual to compulsive drug use. Our laboratory has identified a specific mechanism which shows promising evidence towards its role in compulsive behaviour. Therefore, my project will consist of investigating neural modulators that may have an effect on this mechanism. Ultimately, we will try to investigate whether blocking these neural modulators could be used for potential treatment to counter the compulsive behaviour seen in addicts.