I’m sitting in the lab where Bianca Jupp works, surrounded by glass beakers and microscope slides, and we’ve been talking about coffee for over five minutes. This is a bit ironic, considering that I’m here to interview her about her research into addiction – but we still agree that Hot Numbers makes some of the best coffee in Cambridge.

“My work aims to understand the neural basis of impulsivity and addictive behaviours,” Jupp explains. “Many of us might go to the pub – or have that cup of coffee! – but only a small proportion of the population will be predisposed to addiction. We want to know why the brain is more vulnerable to addiction in these people, and whether there are pre-existing differences there.” Knowing the basic biology behind addiction is an important step towards better treatment, especially as “the translation of positive results from experimental models hasn’t always worked as well”, says Jupp.

This is partly because psychological disorders like addiction have previously been approached in terms of symptoms instead of underlying causes, or, as Jupp puts it, “symptomology not physiology [...] A ‘disorder’ is defined by a disparate collection of symptoms – so, for example, ‘impulsivity’ is actually a collection of neural properties manifesting as one behaviour. Neuroscience, on the other hand, really wants to drag psychology and psychiatry kicking and screaming into the 21st century!”

Jupp started her neuroscience career back in Australia, where she studied epilepsy for her PhD at the University of Melbourne. “I fell into neuroscience,” she says, “although I did flirt with becoming a physiotherapist!” The deciding factor, though, was a love of science and a lifelong fascination of the human brain. The sense of wonder at “how that pound of mush creates who we are” continues to inform both her research and teaching in the Psychology Department today.

Her PhD was the first neural imaging study to track disease development in an animal model. This meant imaging the brains of individuals before they developed epilepsy symptoms, then repeating the scans over time as the disease progressed. This allowed researchers to distinguish between seizure control – the focus of most other epilepsy research – and the underlying brain differences generating vulnerability to seizures in the first place. After her PhD, Jupp moved into neuropsychiatry to study addiction, an area with even more unanswered questions. “It was another chance to use imaging techniques”, she says, “and animal models of addiction were also often lacking”. Her first postdoc, in the Howard Florey Institute, was the basis to apply for a fellowship in Cambridge, where she has been for the past 4 years. She’s now working towards a permanent, independent research position.

Her current research uses similar approaches to her epilepsy work. “Neural imaging is key,” she says, explaining how imaging the brain in animal models of addiction allows us to see it in a ‘pre-morbid’ state, and thus tease apart the underlying biology from confounding effects. “Too often, research doesn’t look at the underlying disease. You can look at the immediate effects of a drug and the reward mechanisms that light up when taking the drug, or the actual disease process of addiction.” But why animal models? “They’re very powerful. You can do the same behavioural studies in people and get the same result. But with people, we can’t study the brain before addictive behaviour manifests – we’d have to scan the brains of all the humans in the world to do that!”

So what is a typical day in the lab like? “There isn’t one! The great thing about science is that I can use my analytical brain but also indulge my creative side. And there always has to be time for coffee – it’s a wonderful cognitive enhancer.”