Please join us at the San Diego Convention Center for SfN/Neuroscience 2025!
Visit us at the RATTACA booth to support the HS rats P30 center!

Sunday, November 16 – Wednesday, November 19, 2025

Dr. Abraham Palmer and Palmer Lab members will be hosting the RATTACA booth:

Remember to tag #RATTACA on social media!

See the post from SfN 2024 here!

The 22nd Annual Meeting of the Complex Trait Community (CTC) was held October 21 to 24, 2025 at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, Spain in collaboration with the Rat Genomics Community.

Palmer Lab members Dr. Palmer, Dr. Oksana Polesskaya, Dr. Thiago Sanches, Dr. Montana Lara, Dr. Zachary Tatom, and Apurva Chitre attended and presented in person.

See program details here!

CTC 2025 photo album
Barcelona, Spain

The manuscript titled “Novel insights into the genetic architecture and mechanisms of host/microbiome interactions from a multi-cohort analysis of outbred laboratory rats” was accepted in Nature Communications.

Authors include current Palmer Lab members: Denghui Chen, Apurva Chitre, Benjamin Johnson, Thiago Missfeldt Sanches, Oksana Polesskaya, and Abraham Palmer.

Congratulations!

The manuscript titled “Sex-specific transcriptional signatures of oxycodone persist during withdrawal and abstinence in the suprachiasmatic nucleus of heterogeneous stock rats” was accepted in Addiction Neuroscience.

Authors: Tara C. Delorme, Snehal Sambare, Benjamin R. Williams, Mackenzie C. Gamble, Lieselot L.G. Carrette, Leah C Solberg Woods, Lisa Maturin, Abraham A. Palmer, Olivier George, Ryan W. Logan

Congratulations!

A U01 grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) was awarded to Dr. Giordano de Guglielmo (contact MPI), with Abraham Palmer as one of several MPIs.

The grant is titled “The Genetic Basis of Opioid Dependence Vulnerability in a Rodent Model” and it will start September 30, 2025 and end on May 31, 2030.

[This is a renewal of “The Genetic Basis of Opioid Dependence Vulnerability in a Rodent Model” (U01DA045300), awarded to Dr. Peter Kalivas, Medical University of South Carolina, from 2018-2024.]

Congratulations!

A new R01 grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) was awarded to Dr. Lieselot Carrette, with Dr. Abraham Palmer as co-investigator. 

The grant is titled “Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Outbred Rats with Variable Vulnerability to Compulsive Alcohol Use” and it will start September 20, 2025 and end on August 31, 2029.

Congratulations!

Dr. Brittany Leger successfully defended her thesis titled “Utilizing a network biology framework to integrate GWAS signal across species, variants, and traits” on September 15, 2025. 

Congratulations, Dr. Leger!

See additional photos in the Photo Gallery!

Dr. Palmer gave a talk titled “Genetic evidence supports a relationship between locomotor activity in a novel environment in rodents a human externalizing behavior” at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) annual team meeting for Genetics and Epigenetics Cross-Cutting Research on September 11, 2025 at the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, MD.

His talk was during the session titled “Harnessing Model Organism Genetics and Genomics in the Understanding the Role of Human Genetic Variation in SUDs,” which he co-chaired with Dr. Elissa Chesler.

The manuscript titled “Delay discounting violations vary by adolescent sociodemographics: Excluding nonsystematic data may bias conclusions” was accepted in Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology.

The manuscript titled “Genome-wide association studies of delay discounting and impulsive personality traits in children from the Adolescent Behavior and Cognitive Development Study” was accepted in Genes, Brain and Behavior.

Congratulations!