Kyna Conn
Dr Kyna Conn is a post-doctoral researcher in the Anorexia and Feeding Disorders Group at the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute. She completed her PhD at the Queensland Brain Institute in 2021 under the supervision of Dr James Kesby and A/Prof Thomas Burne, in which her research was focused on subcortical dopamine function and decision-making deficits in schizophrenia using virally-mediated neural circuit modulation and pharmacological manipulations in mouse models. She was awarded the University of Queensland Graduate Ready Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2021. Dr Conn joined the Foldi Group in 2022 to extend her understanding of monoamine function in corticostriatal circuits and the relationships between neurochemical signalling and cognitive behaviour in the context of anorexia nervosa. Her major research focus is on determining the influence of psilocybin, the psychoactive component in “magic mushrooms”, on cognition, reward, and pathological weight loss, and how this may be mediated by regionally- and receptor-specific serotonin and dopamine function.
Abstracts this author is presenting: