Postgraduate Student Profile
Victoria Hurst
Email: victoria.hurst@ncl.ac.uk
Centre for Behaviour and Evolution
Institute of Neuroscience, Newcastle University
Henry Wellcome Building
Framlington Place
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE2 4HH
Research Interests
I graduated from the University of Leeds in 2007 with a BSc Pharmacology and began a PhD at Newcastle University in October 2009.
I am developing a behavioural rodent model to reflect affective disorders under the supervision of Prof. Paul Flecknell and Dr Melissa Bateson.
I am interested in improving understanding and identification of ‘emotion’ in laboratory animals.
Project
New Approaches to Assessing Negative Affective State in Rats Experiencing Drug Withdrawal
The method I am developing exploits the changes in judgement that are caused by differing affective states, for example optimism in relation to a positive state (e.g. happiness) and pessimism in relation to negative states (e.g. anxiety, depression etc.), and will be used to look at affective states induced by environmental stressors.
I will also be taking my work to the pharmaceutical company Pfizer to determine whether my model can detect changes in mood following withdrawal from novel drugs undergoing safety testing.
