The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation presented the Palmer Lab with honors for one of the Top Advancements & Breakthroughs by Foundation Grantees in 2017. This list illustrates some of the major research achievements by BBRF grantees over the past year.

For the past 30 years, Brain & Behavior Research Foundation Grants have funded the most innovative ideas in neuroscience and psychiatry.

This past year, BBRF funded more than $19 million divided between approximately 400 Young Investigator Grantees, approximately 80 Independent Investigator Grantees, and 15 Distinguished Investigator Grantees who are expected to

The article, “Genome-wide association study of delay discounting in 23,217 adult research participants of European ancestry” written by Dr. Sandra Sanchez-Roige, was published in Nature Neuroscience.

The recently published article has garnered significant attention in various news and social media outlets. Altmetric.com ranked the article in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric. It was also featured by Newsweek with an article on 12/12/17. 23andMe interviewed Dr. Abraham Palmer on the 23andMeBlog. The article was also featured on Genética Médica.

Congratulations, Sandra!

Drs. Amanda Barkley-Levenson and Sandra Sanchez-Roige each attended the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology 2017 meeting in Palm Springs, CA. The meeting took place December 3-7, 2017. Dr. Sanchez-Roige presented a poster titled ‘Using Genome-Wide Association Studies to Explore the Role of Impulsivity in Psychiatric Diseases.’ Dr. Barkley-Levenson presented a poster titled ‘Use of intracranial self-stimulation as a screen for novel preclinical therapeutics for alcohol use disorders.’

Dr. Abraham Palmer spoke at the School of Medicine Seminar Series at the University of Utah on Tuesday November 28th, 2017. His talk was titled “Using the quantitative genetics toolbox to identify new ways to treat mental illness.”

The Second Shaanxi Province Silk Road Forum of Young Scholars was held on November 15-17, 2017 in Xi’an, China. Dr. Jianjun Gao was invited to present his research with a talk entitled, “A cost-effective pipeline of genome-wide SNP calling from Genotyping by Sequencing (GBS) data of HS rats.”

The article written by Dr. Sandra Sanchez-Roige entitled “The genetics of human personality” was accepted for publication in Genes, Brain and Behavior. Dr. Abraham Palmer is a co-author on the paper.

Congratulations, Sandra!

The article, “Genetic Analysis of Impulsive Personality Traits: Examination of A Priori Candidates and Genome-wide Variation,” is in press and will be published in Psychiatry Research. Drs. Abraham Palmer & Jianjun Gao are co-authors, along with Joshua Gray, James MacKillop, Jessica Weafer, Kyle Hernandez, and Harriet de Wit.

Dr. Sandra Sanchez-Roige gave a talk at the World Congress of Psychiatric Genetics entitled, “Genome-Wide Association Study of Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test (AUDIT) Scores in an Unselected Cohort of 20,328 Research Participants of European Ancestry: Rs41973904 and Beyond.”  The conference took place in Orlando, Florida on October 13-17, 2017.

Congratulations, Sandra!

Congratulations to Yu-yu for setting a new American record and unofficially breaking a world record in weight lifting! He deadlifted 340kg, which is 15kg over the current world record.

Check out the article about him here!

The article written by Dr. Sandra Sanchez-Roige entitled “Genome-wide association study of Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test (AUDIT) scores in 20,328 research participants of European ancestry” was accepted for publication in Addiction Biology. Dr. Abraham Palmer is a co-author on the paper. Read the article here.

Great work, Sandra!