Mihaela Iordanova

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Mihaela Iordanova is an Associate Professor at Concordia University, a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Behavioural Neuroscience, a 2020 CAN Young Investigator, and a 2016 NARSAD Young Investigator. Her research focuses on delineating the neurobiological mechanisms of learning and memory in fear and reward. 
 
Mihaela began her research career as an honours student in the laboratory of Dr. Frederick Westbrook at the University of New South Wales, where she obtained a B.Psych (Hones) and later a Ph.D. Her postdoctoral work took her initially to one of the world’s hubs for learning theory and behaviour, namely Cardiff University where she worked with Drs. Rob Honey, Mark Good, Simon Killcross, Dominic Dwyer, John Aggleton, and John Pearce. Subsequently, she joined Dr. Schoenbaum at the University of Maryland and the National Institute on Drug Abuse. In 2014, Mihaela commenced an independent position at Concordia University.
 
Understanding how learning is implemented in the brain has been at the centre of Mihaela’s research interests. Currently, her lab is focused on uncovering the role of the mesolimbic dopamine system in learning to predict upcoming appetitive or aversive events, as well as the corticolimbic circuits involved in memory updating exemplified by behavioural paradigms such as extinction, overexpectation and higher-order conditioning.