Dr Kate Peters is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Sussex. She earned her PhD in Prof. James McCutcheon’s lab at the University of Leicester where she investigated how distracting stimuli are processed in the rat ventral tegmental area and whether this is altered in models of psychosis. She then joined Prof. Joseph Cheer’s lab at the University of Maryland where she studied how endocannabinoids modulate both dopamine and serotonin systems in mice. She completed a second postdoctoral position with Dr Eisuke Koya investigating prefrontal neuronal ensembles in food motivated behaviours at the University of Sussex. She was then awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship and her current research focuses on how brain areas such as the ventral tegmental area, nucleus accumbens and prefrontal cortex respond to cues that predict food availability. She is especially interested in how environmental enrichment can reduce the incentive value of food-paired cues and how dopamine release and endocannabinoid modulations are involved in resilience to the invigorating properties of food-associated cues.