Seminar SCALab 04/04/2023

Seminar Prof. Suzanne L DICKSON

Ghrelin – a hormone at the interface between eating and reward

Suzanne L Dickson is a neurobiologist and Professor of Neuroendocrinology at the University
of Gothenburg (Sweden). She is also President of the European Brain Council, advocating for
research in the brain space, and Secretary of the European College for
Neuropsychopharmacology, a society dedicated to applied neuroscience. She graduated with a
Ph.D. in Neuroendocrinology from the University of Cambridge in 1993, where she later
became Senior Lecturer in Physiology. She is a leading figure in neuroendocrinology and works
within many European and international organizations and societies to promote research,
facilitate grant funding and training of Early Career Scientists. Her research into the
neurobiology of appetite aims to unravel neurobiological pathways that respond to orexigenic
signals, such as the hormone, ghrelin, and that drive feeding behaviours, not only food intake
but also food choice, food anticipation, food reward and food motivation. This work involves
mostly preclinical studies and includes behavioural tasks, neural circuit (viral vector) mapping,
chemogenetics and RNAscope.

Her talk will cover topics related to hunger and reward processing. How can ghrelin help
us to find populations of neurones whose function is to control behaviours linked to hunger and
appetite? How does ghrelin impact on motivation for food, food reward and behaviours of
relevance for eating disorders? How may studying the circuits through which ghrelin acts give
advance knowledge in this disease area?