Victoria Braithwaite is the Dorothy and Lloyd Huck chair in behavioral biology and professor of fisheries and biology at Penn State University. Her research uses neuroscience and animal behavior to investigate what animals perceive and how they use this information to change their behavior. One of her research projects on pain perception in fish generated considerable debate and led her to write a popular science book ‘Do Fish Feel Pain?’, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2010. More recently, her research has focused on the emotional component of pain, and what it means for an animal to be aware of its emotions. She collaborates with fish biologists, fish research scientists and industry to determine what it means to provide good welfare for fish in captivity, particularly those we use in research and production.