Dr. Karolina P Skibicka is a Professor and Canada Research Chair at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute, University of Calgary. She previously held the position of Professor of Molecular Medicine at the Institute of Neuroscience and Physiology at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden and Associate Professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at Penn State University, USA. Dr Skibicka earned her PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania, Pearlman School of Medicine and received her postdoctoral training in Neuroendocrinology at the Sahlgrenska Academy, Sweden.

Dr Skibicka currently leads the gut-brain communication laboratory. Her research approach utilizes rat models and applies a wide variety of behavioral neuroscience methodologies and levels of analysis, including behavioral, neuroanatomical, molecular, neuropharmacological, and opto and chemogenetic to investigate the neural basis of gut-brain communication.
Her laboratory discovered that a gut/brain peptide, GLP-1, and its analogues target the mesolimbic system to reduce food motivated behavior, and later also alcohol intake and reward. Since then, she contributed to an array of key discoveries regrading brain circuits and behaviors controlled by gut-brain communication. Core thread in her research is inclusion and analysis of female subjects and paying particular attention to the influence of sex and sex steroids on the gut-brain circuits as well as the behavioral and metabolic outcomes her team investigates.
Dr. Skibicka is a member of the Editorial Board of AJP Regulatory, Integrative, and Comparative Physiology and Comprehensive Physiology.