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Behavioural pharmacology of psychedelic drugs
Can psychedelics be used to treat psychiatric disorders, like addictions and compulsions?
How do psychedelics convey their therapeutic effects?
Can we see any of the therapeutically relevant behavioural effects in rodent models?
How do psychedelics affect rodent behaviour in general?
I became interested in psychedelics during the final stages of my master's degree, originally with an idea that they might work as an interesting tool in studying the brain on different levels of analysis (from genes to network level). I was able to start my doctoral research project with a broad aim of studying psychedelics in mouse models of addiction. I have so far studied the effects of LSD on the goal-directed decision making, voluntary home cage alcohol consumption, hedonic tone in general, and in Pavlovian learning paradigms, and collaborated in examining their neuroplastic effects.
In general, I am fascinated by the behavioural and cognitive effects of psychedelics, their potential as therapeutic tools, as well as the political questions surrounding them.
Rodent mind, rodent behvaviour, and psychiatric disorders
What kind of a mind does a mouse or a rat have?
How much do their minds differ from the human minds?
How should we consider these differences if we want to model human psychiatric disorders in rodents?
Studying psychopharmacological effects with rodent models has made me grow increasingly skeptical about the currently most used models and paradigms in preclinical psychiatry and basic psychiatric neuroscience research. Especially the high-throughput behavioural models originally built for drug screening are way too simplistic to tell anything about the psychiatric disorders scientists claim to be studying with them.
Way too few questions about the nature of the rodent mind, and about its similarities and differences with the human mind are being asked, yet I think these questions would be highly relevant for better inter-species translatability.
In relation to these questions, I am interested in concepts like automated homecage behavioural monitoring, ethopharmacology, common currency tasks, computational psychiatry, behavioural clustering, and meta science.
Bubbling under
Things I have growing interest in but have not had time, resources, or skills to get underway.
Meta-science (especially preclinical psychopharmacology and psychiatric models); behavioural clustering, computational phenotyping, and computational psychiatry; statistical models; sex as a biological variable; normative databases for rodent behaviour; sociology of (neuro)science and psychiatry; open science; citizen science.
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