Q: What is the main focus of your research and how have you been tackling it?
A: My research focuses on characterizing individuality in drug preference in a model of opioid-stimulant polydrug use in rats. In humans, we see highly variable patterns and motivations for polydrug combinations that are highly dependent on individual preferences, and I’ve found this is also true in rats.
Some Research Context
Combining opioids and stimulants together has been reported to produce enhanced euphoria, or consumption that “feels better,” than consuming either drug individually. We also know that polydrug use in humans increases associated harms such as vulnerability to relapse and risk of mortality.
Polydrug use is not a novel phenomenon, however, over the last couple decades we are seeing increases in overdose rates attributed to these combinations, with approximately 73% of opioid-related deaths involving a stimulant and 78% of stimulant related deaths involving an opioid in 2024. Unfortunately, current pharmacotherapies exist only to treat opioid use disorder (e.g. opioid agonists such as methadone or antagonists such as naloxone), with little effective treatment options for those with stimulant use disorder due to how stimulants operate in the brain.
Addie’s Research Focus
Preclinical research has very well-established rodent models of single drug use (e.g., cocaine and heroin), that have been used to test various pharmacotherapies and behaviours surrounding drug use disorders, in addition to “cocktail” models of polydrug use. However, those models lack the aspect of “choice” or individuality that contributes to the increased risk of relapse and other harms associated with drug use. In my current project, I am attempting to first characterize individual populations of rats that display different drug preferences and then test whether these preferences contribute to relapse behaviours. The end goal is to eventually test the efficacy of current and novel treatment therapies.
Q: What got you interested in the subject matter? And, what continues to motivate you?
A: Drug use in general has fascinated me since I was a teenager, as I saw the effect of the opioid crisis hit families around me. After I began my career in research, I developed a passion for reverse translating human behaviours into rodent models, to increase translatability and efficacy of preclinical literature. Since starting in Dr. Murray’s lab in 2019, I have been continuously bugging her to start up polydrug use experiments, and the design was inspired by a paper out of Dr. Gregory Collins’ lab in San Antonio, Texas which was one of the first to develop a concurrent access polydrug task.
My passion for science and asking questions fuels my motivation to further develop this task. I’m particularly interested in uncovering new aspects of polydrug use that contribute to the heightened harms associated with its consumption in humans.
Q: What was it like to win best PhD Talk at Neuroscience Day? What did it mean to you?
A: As the design has been ongoing since I began graduate school, I really enjoyed being able to share a project that I am extremely proud of! Neuroscience Day is an incredible opportunity to showcase and learn about all the impressive neuroscience research done across many departments at U of G, but especially within the department of Psychology. I hope by both showcasing our research and having a Psychology student win these awards (a Psychology undergraduate student, Kaycee Bazinet, won best poster), continues to show how awesome our preclinical researchers are!
Q: How will you move forward with your findings? What are the next steps?
A: I am currently running replications to further characterize and confirm the behaviours I saw previously. The next step is to explore the interaction between drug preference and sensitivity to emerging therapies in this task. I recently presented my work as a poster at the 19th Canadian Association of Neuroscience Meeting in Montreal, and it has been submitted to present at the Canadian College of Neuropsychopharmacology Meeting in Toronto in September 2026. I am also working towards publishing these data findings by the end of the summer.
Q: Will you continue researching within the field? What do you hope to study next?
A: I hope I can continue! I really enjoy the research I am doing and have been passionate about it for a very long time. I hope that I can reach the point of testing novel compounds to determine their efficacy for treating polydrug use, or mentor the next student Dr. Murray takes to continue this project!
Q: Where will you go from here and how have you enjoyed U of G?
A: I still have a couple years left of my PhD before pursuing a post-doc position to continue down the polydrug rabbit hole. I hope to become a research associate or staff scientist at a university eventually.
I have been at U of G since 2017, when I began my undergraduate degree in Neuroscience with a minor in Psychology, and have loved my experience. U of G has given me many opportunities I may not have had at a larger institution, with the bonus of it being a beautiful campus!