ICVS researcher Carina Cunha was recognized with the ISN Young Scientist Lectureship Award, granted by the International Society for Neurochemistry (ISN). The award ceremony was conducted on August 21st, 2025, at the ISN-ASN Biennial Meeting in New York, USA.
Presented biennially, the ISN Young Scientist Lectureship Award recognizes the high-level scientific contributions of young scientists not more than ten years from the date of their PhD graduation, who are pushing the boundaries of knowledge in neurochemistry.
As a recognition of this prestigious distinction, Carina Cunha was invited to present a 30-minute lecture during the international meeting, where she presented the new research on which this award is founded.
The ICVS researcher investigates the neurobiological processes underlying motivated and reward-related behaviors, and reward circuit function and dysfunction in mental health. Using an interdisciplinary approach, integrating advanced neuroscience techniques with behavioral and computational analysis, her group aims to identify markers of vulnerability and construct intervention strategies for psychiatric illnesses such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Talking of the award, Carina Cunha said : “Receiving the ISN Young Scientist Lectureship Award is a strong incentive to continue investigating, innovating, and contributing to the advancement of neuroscience.”
During the lecture, the ICVS researcher presented the new results from her lab which shed more light on how neurons within the nucleus accumbens, a brain reward system hub, are involved in rewarding and aversive stimulus processing. Their research also points towards the significance of the endogenous opioid system in the modulation of these processes.
