Emilio Ambrosio is Full Professor of Psychobiology at the National University for Distance Learning (UNED) in Madrid, Spain.

He obtained two different Bachelor Degrees,  Biological Sciences and Psychology, at the Autonomous University of Madrid in 1979. His PhD was also earned at the same University in 1985 working on sex differences in cerebral alpha-adrenergic receptors. After this period of academic training, he started to work in the field of psychopharmacology testing the role of Corticotropin Releasing Factor (CRF) in animal models of depression, and in 1991 he began to study the psychobiological mechanisms involved in drug addiction as Visiting Professor at National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA, Baltimore, USA).

Professor Ambrosio has mainly focused his research in this area on the psychobiological factors that might induce high susceptibility to drugs of abuse, especially psychostimulants and opiates, as well as the interaction between the endocannabinoid system and other neutransmission systems such as the endogenous opioid, dopaminergic, glutamatergic or GABAergic ones, with the aim of studying:

1) the factors that facilitate psychostimulant and opiate self-administration behaviours;

2) the effects that perinatal and peripuberal cannabinoid exposure may have on the acquisition of opiate and psychostimulant self-administration during adulthood;

3) the neuroadaptations that are produced during the maintenance of self-administration behaviour and during its extinction, as possible neuronal correlates of vulnerability to relapse in drug abuse.

He has co-authored numerous scientific articles published in international journal, supervised and  mentored a great number of doctoral thesis, and received several national awards for his contributions to the field of addictive behaviors