Andrea Putica: Connecting stress, brain and lived experience
Studying stress as it is lived
Stress is something most people recognise in their own lives, but for Andrea Putica it is also a research problem that unfolds across the brain, the body and lived experience.
A key achievement in her work has been securing and leading a Women’s Health Research Catalyst Grant to examine stress in people with Functional Neurological Disorder (FND). The study is designed to capture how stress operates in real time, by combining daily emotion tracking, biological measures and brain imaging within a single research protocol.
The ambition of the project lies in its integration. Participants record how they feel across several days, provide saliva samples to measure stress hormones and complete an MRI brain scan. Bringing these components together required rigorous coordination, careful timing and a strong focus on making the study workable for participants.
The main challenge was not the idea itself, but getting all of these components to work together in practice. Taking this from concept to a functioning study has been the most meaningful part.
Building a study across disciplines
Andrea chose to pursue this work at the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences because it offered the interdisciplinary conditions needed to support a study that cuts across psychology, neuroscience and psychiatry. Access to a clinical FND population, MRI infrastructure and supervisors with experience in translational research made the project feasible.
Equally important, she says, was the research culture.
“The people I work with are rigorous and direct, which has improved how I design studies and interpret results.”
Andrea’s broader goal is to improve how stress-related conditions, such as FND and PTSD, are understood and treated. At present, treatments can be effective for some people but not others, often without a clear explanation.
Part of the problem is that the brain, the body and a person’s experience are often studied separately.
Turning complexity into better care
Her work aims to link these elements by examining how stress hormones fluctuate across the day, how the brain responds and how people interpret what they are feeling in everyday life. By identifying consistent patterns across these levels, Andrea hopes to support more targeted treatments rather than relying on trial and error.
What she finds most engaging about this kind of research is that the answers are rarely straightforward.
Often they don’t line up cleanly, which is where most of the useful questions come from.
The award supporting this project is significant because it allows the study to be carried out as designed. With little room for delays or missed data, particularly at an early-career stage, this support makes it possible to manage the practical challenges that determine whether complex research succeeds.
Some of those challenges are unexpectedly hands-on. Andrea recalls testing different containers and insulation at home to keep saliva samples consistently frozen – a reminder that good research often depends on solving practical problems far beyond the laboratory bench.
Together, these scientific and logistical efforts are shaping a body of work focused on understanding stress as it is lived, measured and experienced, with the aim of improving care for people whose symptoms do not fit neatly into traditional categories.