Dr Robyn Brown

Robyn Brown is a DECRA Fellow and laboratory head in the Department of Biochemistry and Pharmacology, University of Melbourne. She completed her PhD at Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences in 2010 and a Bachelor of Commerce/Science (hons) in 2004 at University of Melbourne. In 2011 she obtained a Sir Keith Murdoch Fellowship to undertake postdoctoral training in the Kalivas laboratory (Medical University of South Carolina) where she contributed to a number of influential studies investigating neuroplasticity in drug addiction. During her postdoc Robyn established an independent line of research investigating the parallels between drug addiction and overeating. In 2014 Robyn returned to Australia (Florey) where she continued this line of research and has been continuously funded in the form of career awards and major grants. Her laboratory studies the neural mechanisms underlying compulsive forms of motivated behaviour such as loss-of-control eating and drug addiction using a multi-disciplinary approach which involves behavioural pharmacology, electrophysiology, fibre photometry, chemogenetics, optogenetics, transgenic mouse models, viral methods and confocal microscopy.