Stephanie L. Borgland

Dr. Stephanie Borgland is a Professor and a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in the Departments of Physiology & Pharmacology as well as Psychiatry at the University of Calgary.

She is affiliated with the Hotchkiss Brain Institute, the Mathison Centre for Mental Health Research and Education and the Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute. She is a member of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada. From 2008-2013 she was an Assistant Professor in the department of Anesthesiology, Pharmacology & Therapeutics at the University of British Columbia.

She received her PhD in Pharmacology/Neuroscience from the University of Sydney, Australia in 2002 and completed her post-doctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco ending in 2007. Her research focuses on understanding the neurobiological mechanisms of aberrant motivation related to addiction and obesity.

Dr. Borgland is an internationally recognized leader in the neurobiology of motivated behaviour. The Borgland lab uses electrophysiology, behavioral neuropharmacology, circuit tracing, biosensing, and optogenetic techniques to explore how areas of the brain involved in reward valuation and motivated behaviour are rewired by consumption of palatable foods, obesegenic diets or drugs of abuse. The laboratory has made exciting discoveries on how satiety-promoting hormones modulate plasticity within the mesolimbic circuit, palatable food induces plasticity to prime food seeking, and how obesity or drugs of abuse rewire circuits involved in motivated behaviour and reward valuation. Her innovative research is illuminating the neurobiological factors underlying disordered eating or addiction.