Dr. Lynne Sneddon, Research Advisor

Dr. Sneddon has worked for over two decades on topics that have advanced fish health and welfare and used her research to drive the agenda for the improved welfare of fishes. Fish welfare was an understudied area prior to 2002 since it was previously believed that they did not possess pain receptors (nociceptors). Sneddon worked in Dr Mike Gentle’s laboratory at the Roslin Institute, UK, as a postdoctoral fellow from 1999 and identified nociceptors on the head and face of rainbow trout for the first time which was published in 2002. This novel discovery that fish experience pain has since fueled Sneddon’s research, and she has dedicated her career to informing the way in which fishes are treated in the laboratory and in other contexts.

Sneddon has become the recognized world expert on fish welfare and was invited to develop training resources, participate in workshops, and deliver educational events and talks to veterinarians as well as technical care staff and academics. She is also regularly invited to give talks at academic conferences, laboratory animal meetings, animal law conferences, public events and to industry and other stakeholders. In 2023, Sneddon was awarded the Johns Hopkins CAAT and Charles River Excellence in Refinement Award and she is giving the Charles River Ethics and Animal Welfare Lecture at the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science (AALAS) meeting. Sneddon currently leads her team at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden investigating how to improve the way we treat fishes, decapod crustaceans and cuttlefish.