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Eileen Joyce

Eileen Joyce

Australian pianist

Jul 17, 2026

3:02
And coming to your PhD, Eileen, also focusing on dopamine psychopharmacology, how did Sue's approach shape the way you were trained to think?
3:11
Of course, after-- straight after my PhD, I went on to do medicine and trained as a psychiatrist, so most of my further work was in the clinical sphere.
3:21
But my way of thinking, at least in the clinic, about brain function and drug action in patients comes largely from my time as a PhD.
3:29
I still think the same way as I did when I was a PhD student with Sue.
3:34
I was taught to think by Sue and the people around us in terms of how drugs can affect different brain systems and how these brain systems mediate and affect different clinical symptoms.
3:46
So to give an example, in Parkinson's disease, you can explain why depression can precede the onset of the motor symptoms, such as tremor, by several years.
3:57
And this is because we know that the alpha-synuclein pathology spreads upwards through the brain stem to the forebrain and actually affects the serotonergic raphe nuclei and the noradrenergic locus coeruleus before the midbrain substantia nigra.
5:26
How did the dopamine prefrontal framework that Sue helped build actually translate to real patients? That's the big question, isn't it?

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