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This September, Prof Dora Duka will receive a Distinguished Achievement Award at the 2025 European Behavioural Pharmacology Society (EBPS) meeting in Almería, Spain.

Prof Dora Duka is Professor of Experimental Psychology in the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience group of the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex. She is also a founding member of the Sussex Addiction Research & Intervention Centre (SARIC).

The following information is from Dora's biography on the EBPS website: 

"Dora qualified in Medicine in Athens where she also completed her PhD in Pharmacology, followed by postdoctoral research in Neuropsychopharmacology with Albert Herz at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, Germany. The development of a severe allergy to lab animals encouraged Dora to complete her training as an Anaesthetist in Germany and to move to human psychopharmacology research. Subsequently she worked in the pharmaceutical industry as head of Clinical Psychopharmacology Department, at Schering (now Bayer) in Berlin. She returned to Academia in 1995 as a Reader (Associate Professor) at Sussex University in the UK where she became established as an experimental psychologist. Her work translating ideas and methodologies from animals to humans has been pivotal for research in cognitive and emotional processes in addictive behaviours. 

​​Dora’s early-career investigations led to the first demonstration of a relationship between benzodiazepines and endogenous opiate systems and the first suggestion that benzodiazepine use may lead to dependence. Her more recent work has focused on brain mechanisms underlying the acute effects of alcohol on cognition and emotional sensitivity in social drinkers, and in particular the long term effects of alcohol in binge drinkers and alcoholics. She has used functional and structural imaging to reveal these mechanisms. Her work has been supported over the years at Sussex by the UK Medical Research Council and by the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the NIH and the European Commission."

To learn more about SARIC, our research, and the opportunities we offer, please visit our website.

Further information: https://www.ebps2025.com/copy-of-program

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