CSBN third-time lucky Stephanie Fulton wins thesis prize

By Frank Kuin

Stephanie Fulton, a PhD graduate from Concordia's Department of Psychology, will be awarded this year's Prix d'Excellence by l'Academie des Grands Montrealais, an institution of the city's Board of Trade that honours distinguished Montrealers.

Fulton, now a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University, has been selected for the $5,000 prize for her outstanding PhD thesis on ‘functional organization of brain reward circuitry,’ a study characterizing different subsets of neurons that generate a rewarding effect when electrically stimualted. She will receive the award at a ceremony in October.

‘It's a very prestigious honour to receive,’ said Fulton, who presented her work to a jury of the Grands Montré alais Society. The award is given for the best doctoral thesis in natural sciences, selected from the four Montreal universities.

The prize reaffirms the outstanding work of the Psychology Department’s Centre for Studies in Behavioral Neurobiology (CSBN), as it is the third time in five years that graduates from the Centre have won the honour. In 1999, Andreas Arvanitogiannis, now an assistant professor at the CSBN, received the award; in 2001, Celia Flores won it.

‘It's a phenomenal centre. I really can't say enough about it,’ said Fulton, who did her BA, MA and PhD work at Concordia. “My view is still very strong about that, even after coming [to Harvard], which is obviously an outstanding institution.’

The CSBN has a strong team of senior researchers interested in the fundamental brain mechanisms underlying motivation and learning. Fulton expressed particular gratitude to her supervisors, Professors Peter Shizgal and Barbara Woodside, the Centre's director.

‘They were extremely encouraging and supportive, and challenged my thinking,’ she said.

With Shizgal, in whose lab she was first accepted as an MA student, Fulton pursued research into the neural mechanisms of reward.‘The idea of understanding how rewarding stimuli and behaviours are processed in the brain has always been intriguing to me,’ she said.

In her thesis, she examined a phenomenon known as brain stimulation reward, whereby test animals can be taught to perform a response, such as pressing a lever, in order to reinitiate the rewarding effect caused by the stimulation delivered through an implanted electrode.

Working with rats, she characterized a subset of neurons in the brain responsible for this pleasurable effect, showing that ‘there are actually functionally separate subsets of neurons that are involved in brain stimulation reward.’

Fulton's research, along with that of others in the field, helps understand how this circuitry is organized, she said. Practical applications include an enhanced understanding of the natural rewarding effect of food in a context of food restriction and weight loss, a topic Fulton studied in her MA thesis.

At Harvard, Fulton is continuing that line of research. Working with one of the world’s leading investigators on neural mechanisms in the areas of diabetes, body weight regulation and obesity, she is ‘investigating reward pathways in the brain, and how they are changed in the diet-induced obese state.’

‘I'm interested in seeing how a high-fat diet may produce changes in these reward pathways in the brain, and how leptin [a hormone associated with body fat] may be involved in that.’