Senior researcher & PI

With a background in cognitive neuroscience, psychopharmacology and addiction medicine, my work is fundamentally multidisciplinary and seeks to translate key preclinical findings from affective neuroscience and addiction to the human domain. I hold a joint position at University of Oslo (Research Fellow in Health Psychology, Department of Psychology) and Oslo University Hospital (Senior Research Fellow, Department of Research & Development, Section for Emergencies and Critical Care, AKU)

My research interests center on the neurochemistry of reward experience and behavior, stress responses and value-based decision-making. More specifically, I study the functions of the human opioid- and endocannabinoid systems and how drugs that impact these influence reward, pain, abuse liability, stress and resilience. I investigate these processes in a range of different groups, including patients with substance use and misuse, surgical patients, patients with chronic or acute pain as well as healthy volunteers.

I have a PhD from Norwegian Centre for Addiction Research (Medical Faculty, University of Oslo) from 2017 on the role of the µ-opioid system in human reward. This built directly on my Master’s Degree in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Department of Psychology, University of Oslo. My first postdoctoral project was a pharmacological neuroimaging (fMRI) study of opioid reward effects at the Department of Diagnostic Physics, Oslo University Hospital. In my second postdoc I led a work package in the ERC funded OPIOIDREWARD study at the Department of Psychology, Univ. Oslo. The goal of this study was to understand how psychosocial stress influences abuse liability, experience, and cognitive effects of opioid drugs. I spent a research term at Oxford University during my PhD (2015, with Prof. Morten Kringelbach) and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Michigan (with Prof. Chad Brummett) the spring of 2024.

I am involved in several large projects (NorOp) where we are investigating how stress and other psychological factors impact opioid abuse liability in surgical patients at Oslo University Hospital (OUS) and Kongsberg Hospital (KH). In my new project CannaStress, we are testing whether the endocannabinoid system can buffer from the negative effects of stress across experimental and clinical settings. I will be recruiting a PhD student and project coordinator for this during the winter of 2025.

I also lead a work package in the NALTREC study of long-term pharmacotherapy with opioid drugs for opioid use disorder where we test how different treatments influence reward, stress, and pain responses.

Research interests:

• Reward experience, behavior and value-based decision-making
• Endocannabinoids
• Opioid system psychopharmacology
• Stress and pain responses
• Drug expectation effects
• Functional neuroimaging (fMRI)
• Sweet taste and olfactory preferences

Publication list (Google scholar)

contact: marie.eikemo@psykologi.uio.no

Bluesky: @marieeikemo.bsky.social

Twitter: @Marie_Eikemo