Claire Hales

Dr. Claire Hales will be a MSFHR Research Trainee in the at the University of British Columbia. Her research expertise includes behavioral psychopharmacology and molecular neuroscience combined with computational modelling to study psychiatric disorders.
Claire received her PhD from the University of Bristol in 2017, where she developed a novel rodent decision making task and used a two-choice decision making model to investigate the manifestation of depression-related affective biases. Through a BBSRC Industrial Partnership Award in collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim, Claire has continued to pursue this research during a post-doc in Bristol, combining the behavioral task with techniques to target neural pathways thought to be important in the regulation of affective biases to investigate the neural circuits and molecular mechanisms underlying the rapid onset antidepressant efficacy of ketamine.  Dr. Hales’s research focus at UBC will be to use computational modeling to investigate the cognitive processes underlying behaviors related to gambling disorder in rats.