We are pleased to welcome Freya Marijatta to the Unit as an MRC-funded D.Phil. student in Professor Peter Magill’s Group.

Freya graduated with a B.Sc. in Psychology from University College London, and then completed a M.Sc. in Neuroscience at the University of Oxford. As part of Freya’s M.Sc. research, she worked with Dr. Mark Walton on a project examining the effect of background reward rate on learned Pavlovian behaviours and dopaminergic activity, implementing a novel behavioural task and making photometric recordings of dopaminergic neurons.

During Freya’s D.Phil. thesis work in the Unit, she will use in vivo electrophysiological recordings, cell-type-selective manipulations, behavioural analysis and computational methods to elucidate how the activity of midbrain dopamine neurons impacts on their neuronal targets in the striatum to govern purposeful movement.