Rate My Professor Christina Perry

Christina Perry is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychological Sciences at Macquarie University. She earned her PhD in Behavioural Neuroscience from the University of New South Wales in 2012, with a thesis titled "The role of opioids within the striatopallidal circuitry in relapse to reward seeking." After completing her doctorate, she relocated to Melbourne for a postdoctoral position in the Behavioural Neuroscience division at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, collaborating with Andrew Lawrence and Jee Hyun Kim on research into addiction circuitry and relapse mechanisms.

Perry's research investigates neural circuits underlying learning, memory, and motivation, with a focus on addiction and substance use disorders. She employs animal models to examine inhibitory processes and relapse to drug-seeking, the cognitive impacts of chronic alcohol use during aging, exercise as a potential intervention for alcohol craving incubation, and the zona incerta's role in conditioned fear extinction. She serves as Primary Chief Investigator on projects including the NHMRC Ideas Grant "Incubation of craving for alcohol: Is exercise a viable intervention?" (2023–2027) and an ARC Discovery Grant "Role of Zona Incerta RXFP3+ cells in Fear Conditioning" (2021–2024). Perry has received the Society for Mental Health Research Early Career Fellowship (2015), NHMRC/ARC Dementia Research Development Fellowship (2016), Young Investigator Award (2016), Alan Rembach Travel Scholarship (2018), Career Development Award (2019), and Travel Award (2019). Key publications include "A CBD-rich hemp extract is superior to CBD alone in reducing relapse to methamphetamine-seeking in rats" (Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry, 2026), "Adolescent male and female rats show enhanced latent inhibition of conditioned fear compared to adult rats" (Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 2025), "Bed nucleus of stria terminalis enkephalin neurons contribute to depletion-induced salt appetite" (The Journal of Neuroscience, 2026), "Of mice, molecules and mental health: establishment of the consortium for preclinical psychiatric research to find solutions to the translational gap" (Molecular Psychiatry, 2026), and "Four hypothalamic peptides and their impact on drug-seeking behaviour: a prefrontal cortex view" (2022). She teaches units such as Advanced Topics in Physiological Psychology and Biopsychology of Learning, and supervises postgraduate research students.