Claire Foldi

Dr Claire Foldi is a Research Fellow in the Department of Physiology at Monash University and a Group Leader in the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute (BDI) Metabolism, Diabetes and Obesity Program. She completed her PhD in Behavioural Neuroscience at the Queensland Brain Institute in 2012 under the supervision of A/Prof Thomas Burne and Prof Darryl Eyles. Following Postdoctoral training in electrophysiology at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, she was recruited to the laboratory of Prof Brian Oldfield at Monash University in 2015.

Dr Foldi’s research priority is to understand the neurobiological mechanisms that underlie serious psychiatric disease. She is particularly interested in the often-unreported response heterogeneity that occurs in single neurons, animal models and patients in the clinic. She believes that interrogating the mechanisms underpinning this variability will inform the development of more effective treatment strategies.

Claire's current work focuses on the impact of specific neural circuitries on feeding behaviour and body weight maintenance in anorexia nervosa. This work was recently funded by the Rebecca L Cooper Medical Research Foundation. She is also determined to uncover genetic, behavioural and metabolic features that predispose individuals to disorders of reward-based feeding including anorexia nervosa and obesity.