Dr. Sandra Sanchez-Roige was awarded the Harry June Award. This special award is given to early career researchers in substance abuse and was established in honor of ACNP Member, Harry June, Ph.D. and is funded by the National Institute for Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse. Dr. June was a renowned research scientist in the field of substance abuse and was a devoted mentor to students and young faculty.  Dr. Sandra Sanchez-Roige was acknowledged for this special award by Dr. Steve Hyman during the President’s Plenary Session: From Genetics to the Neurobiology

A new R01 grant from the National Eye Institute was awarded to Drs. Monica Jablonski, Abraham Palmer, and several others. The grant is titled, “Genetic Modulators of Glaucoma.”

Dr. Monica Jablonski (Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Tennessee) received the grant to study glaucoma-related traits in HS rats. Dr. Jablonski has been collaborating with the P50 Center, and this grant will fund phenotyping of eye samples and GWAS for glaucoma-related traits.

The article, “Social and anxiety-like behaviors contribute to nicotine self-administration in adolescent outbred rats,” was accepted for publication in Scientific Reports. Apurva Chitre, Dr. Oksana Polesskaya, and Dr. Abraham Palmer are co-authors along with several others.

Drs. Abraham Palmer and Sandra Sanchez-Roige were recently interviewed on “Spit,” an iHeartRadio podcast with 23andMe. They spoke, along with Nikki Sixx and Dr. Adi Jaffe, about their research on genetics and addiction.

The article, “Genome wide association analysis in a mouse advanced intercross line,” has been accepted for publication in Nature Communications. The article was written by Dr. Natalia Gonzales, Dr. Abraham Palmer, and other co-authors.

Read the article here! Congratulations, Natalia!

The Palmer lab recently attended the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego on November 3-7th.

Apurva Chitre presented a poster titled, “Genetic analysis of multiple measures of locomotor activity in 2,325 outbred Heterogeneous Stock rats.”

The article, “Genome-wide association analyses of risk tolerance and risky behaviors in over one million individuals identify hundreds of loci and shared genetic influences,” was accepted for publication in Nature Genetics. Sandra Sanchez-Roige and Abraham Palmer are co-authors along with several others.

On November 1, Alex Gileta defended his thesis at the University of Chicago. The title of his thesis was “Genetic analyses of Pavlovian conditioning in outbred models,” and it was approved by his committee.

Congratulations, Dr. Gileta!

Dr. Abraham Palmer presented at the Cell Mapping Symposium held at Roth Auditorium at Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine. His talk was titled “Ratification of network research.”

Dr. Sandra Sanchez-Roige presented a poster at the fourth annual Chancellor’s Research Excellence Scholarships Symposium held at UCSD. The title of her poster was “Intersection of Impulsive Personality Traits and Drug Experimentation: A Genome-Wide Association Approach.”