Rate My Professor Samantha Ross

Samantha Ross is an Assistant Research Fellow in the Department of Medicine, Dunedin School of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Otago. She belongs to the Endocrinology Research Group, which conducts clinical trials in endocrinology, including diabetes, metabolism, the relationship between obesity and insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, and osteoporosis. Ross earned her PhD from the University of Otago in 2018. Her doctoral thesis, titled Quantitative electroencephalogram neuroimaging in obesity, utilized EEG techniques to investigate brain activity patterns associated with obesity.

Her research specializations involve obesity and its connections to chronic diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease, brain function transitions from fasting to satiety states, and dysfunctional neural activity in the cortical reward system pertinent to food addiction. Ross examines the therapeutic impacts of high definition transcranial pink noise stimulation (HD-tPNS) applied to the anterior cingulate cortex on food craving reduction and brain activity modulation. She also studies allostasis in the context of health and food addiction, encompassing homeostasis, predictive reference resetting, salience-driven pleasure, and allostatic withdrawal mechanisms. Employing EEG neuroimaging, her work positions obesity as a potential addictive disorder, leveraging tools including the Yale Food Addiction Scale. Key publications co-authored by Ross feature Yue et al. (2026), Machine learning-based identification of abnormal functional connectivity in obesity across different metabolic states in Communications Medicine; Leong et al. (2018), High definition transcranial pink noise stimulation of anterior cingulate cortex on food craving: An explorative study in Appetite (volume 120, pages 673-678); De Ridder et al. (2016), The brain, obesity and addiction: an EEG neuroimaging study in Scientific Reports; and De Ridder et al. (2016), Allostasis in health and food addiction in European Journal of Neuroscience. Additional contributions include conference abstracts such as Leong et al. (2017) in Brain Stimulation and Napper & Ross (2017) in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. Ross's publications have received 106 citations according to ResearchGate metrics.