Lucy Wright
Lucy Wright
Research Assistant
I am a research assistant within the Psychopharmacology and Emotion Research Lab, supervised by Dr Susannah Murphy and Professor Catherine Harmer.
I am working on a UCB funded project investigating whether a battery of implicit measures of cognition is sensitive to the cognitive changes in people with prodromal and early stage Parkinson's disease. The aim of this research is to develop sensitive cognitive biomarkers that can be used to test the effect of new pharmacological agents early in development. In these cognitive clinics we are testing volunteers with Parkinson's, REM sleep behaviour disorder, and healthy controls, from the 'Discovery study: Targeting Pathways to Parkinson's' cohort.
I am also working on a study investigating the behavioural and neural effects of seven-day prucalopride administration, a 5-HT4 agonist currently used to treat chronic constipation, on emotional processing. The drug is being used to investigate the potential antidepressant and pro-cognitive profile of 5-HT4 agonists - drugs that have shown promise in pre-clinical studies.
Prior to this, I carried out my MSc research project within PERL, looking at the effect of an acute dose of prucalopride on emotional processing.