Evaluating the behavioral effects of drug administration is often a very subjective event depending on the animals being tested and the behaviors being observed. Dr. Patrick Randall is concerned with evaluating a variety of mathematical models concerning the relationship between the dose of drug that is administered to an animal, receptor occupancy, and behavioral responses to drug administration. Much of the current behavioral research in pharmacology does not benefit from the more sophisticated pharmacological techniques that can be used for the analysis of neuropharmacological data. The work to be performed will attempt to validate some of these techniques in a dopaminergic system, and to use these approaches to characterize the receptor subtypes that are involved in specific behavioral responses to dopamine agonists and/or antagonists. By demonstrating the feasibility of this mathematical approach and perhaps by developing computer programs by which such data can be readily analyzed it is likely that Dr. Randall will provide means by which other behavioral pharmacologists will be able to conduct and analyze experiments with a considerably greater degree of sophistication.
