Dr. Palmer gave a talk during the 49th Annual Scientific Meeting of the Research Society on Alcohol (RSA) on June 21, 2026 in San Antonio, Texas.

Dr. Palmer’s talk, “Using every part of the buffalo: how a large rodent genetics project encouraged spinoffs, collaborations and secondary data analyses,” was part of the round table session titled “From Biobanks to Behavior: How Shared Bioresources and Genetic Pipelines Drive Ethical Innovation in Preclinical Alcohol Research.”

Dr. Palmer gave a talk during the Annual Meeting of the College on Problems of Drug Dependence (CPDD) on June 17, 2026 in Portland, Oregon.

Dr. Palmer’s talk, “How it Begins: Initial Response to Opioids Strongly Predicts Self-Reported Opioid Use Disorder,” was part of the symposium session titled “Opioid Sensitivity as a Testable Behavioral Phenotype for Extramedical Opioid Use,” organized by Kelly Dunn.

Dr. Montana Lara was invited to give a talk at N@N—Neuroscience at Nemours—on June 17, 2026.

Dr. Lara’s talk, “Decoding complex neurobehavioral traits using multivariate genomic approaches” was hosted by Nemours Children’s Hospital and the University of Delaware.

Dr. Daniel Munro, Assistant Project Scientist at Palmer Lab, was awarded a Pilot Grant for his project titled “Mapping Protein Quantitative Trait Loci in the Heterogeneous Stock Rat Brain to Identify Causal Genes at Substance Use Disorder GWAS Loci.”

Congratulations!

Dr. Palmer is a co-author on “Comparison of Deep Learning Tools for Optic Nerve Axon Quantification Finds Limited Generalizability Upon Independent Validation,” which was recently published in Bioengineering.

The manuscript titled “Genome-wide association study of cocaine self-administration behavior in Heterogeneous Stock rats” was accepted for publication in Nature Communications.

Authors include current and past* Palmer Lab members Montana Lara, Thiago Sanches, Oksana Polesskaya, Denghui Chen, Riyan Cheng, Apurva Chitre, Benjamin Johnson, Elaine Keung*, Khai Nguyen*, and Abraham Palmer.

Congratulations!

Dr. Palmer gave a talk titled “The surprise appearance of an XY female, characterizing a spontaneous mutation in the HS rat colony” during the monthly Rat Genome meeting organized by Hao Chen (on behalf of the International Rat Omics Consortium (IROC).

…fertile XY females, and XXY and XYY individuals that were part of a multigenerational pedigree…

The manuscript titled “High Incidence of Estrous Cycle Irregularities in Heterogeneous Stock (HS) Rats is Associated with Footshock-Resistant Cocaine Intake” was accepted for publication in Psychopharmacology.

The manuscript titled “Genetic Architecture of Addiction-Relevant Behaviors in Outbred Sprague-Dawley Rats Reveals Loci for Anxiety-Like and Nociceptive Traits” was accepted for publication in Genes, Brain and Behavior.

The manuscript was authored by current and past Palmer Lab members Apurva Chitre, Khai Nguyen, Yizhi Wang, Riyan Cheng, Oksana Polesskaya, and Abraham Palmer

Congratulations!

Dr. Montana Lara received a travel scholarship from the International Mammalian Genome Society (IMGS) to attend the 39th International Mammalian Genome Conference in Reykjavík, Iceland on April 7-10, 2026!