Rate My Professor Chris Dayas

Professor Chris Dayas serves as Head of School of Biomedical Sciences and Pharmacy within the College of Health, Medicine and Wellbeing at the University of Newcastle. He obtained his Bachelor of Science with Honours and PhD from the University of Queensland, completing the latter in 2000 with research on the amygdala's response to psychological versus physiological stress. Awarded the CJ Martin Fellowship by the National Health and Medical Research Council in 2001, he pursued postdoctoral training at The Scripps Research Institute in the United States from 2002 to 2006, where he published influential work on neural pathways involved in alcohol relapse reinstatement in journals such as Biological Psychiatry and the Journal of Neuroscience. In 2007, Dayas established his laboratory at the University of Newcastle in the Discipline of Anatomy, supported by an NHMRC grant, to investigate hypothalamic peptides in drug-seeking behaviors.

Dayas is a leading neuroscientist specializing in the brain circuits governing motivation, emotion, stress, and addiction. His research delineates the neuroanatomical and neurochemical interactions between key brain regions like the hypothalamus, amygdala, and striatum that drive relapse to drug use. He has characterized the roles of neuropeptides including orexin (hypocretin) and CART in promoting drug-seeking and has uncovered molecular neuroadaptations underlying vulnerability to addiction. Notable publications include "Stressor categorization: Acute physical and psychological stressors elicit distinctive recruitment patterns in the amygdala and in medullary noradrenergic cell groups" (European Journal of Neuroscience, 2001), "Activation of group II metabotropic glutamate receptors attenuates both stress- and cue-induced ethanol-seeking and modulates c-fos expression in the hippocampus and amygdala" (Journal of Neuroscience, 2006), "Distinct Patterns of Neural Activation Associated with Ethanol Seeking: Effects of Naltrexone" (Biological Psychiatry, 2007), and "Role of the Orexin/Hypocretin system in stress-related psychiatric disorders" (Current Topics in Behavioral Neurosciences, 2017). He holds memberships in the Society for Neuroscience, Australian Neuroscience Society, and Research Society on Alcoholism, and was an invited speaker at the 2004 Research Society on Alcoholism meeting. Dayas has supervised 18 PhD students to completion and leads projects utilizing optogenetics to probe stress- and addiction-induced neural rewiring.