The NIDA Genetics Consortium meeting was held on Saturday June 16th on the UCSD campus at the Medical Education and Telemedicine Building. Speakers from all over the world came to discuss recent advances in genetics and genomics as well as the genetics of substance abuse and addiction. See the full schedule here!

Dr. Abraham Palmer presented a talk titled, “Strategies to dissect the genetics of various phenotypes associated with SUD from multiple species: Are we measuring the right phenotype?”

Palmer lab member Amelie Baud recently gave birth to a baby girl named Chloe! Congratulations, Amelie! We can’t wait to meet her.

Dr. Abraham Palmer was awarded a High Impact Research Project Award from the California Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program (TRDRP) for his project titled “Genetic relationship between impulsivity and nicotine abuse.” This is a three year, $750,000 grant that starts July 1, 2018 and ends June 30, 2021.  This grant will fund a large project to study the genetics of impulsivity and a variety of traits related to smoking and other forms of drug abuse.

A U01 grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) was awarded to Dr. Robert Hitzemann, Dr. Suzanne Mitchell, and Dr. Abraham Palmer. The grant, titled “Identification of genetic features of delay discounting using a heterogeneous stock rat model,” will start on July 1, 2018 and will end April 30, 2023.

Dr. Abraham Palmer recently gave a talk about the genetics of delay discounting at the annual Society for the Quantitative Analyses of Behavior meeting in San Diego. His talk was titled “Rats! Quantitative Behavioral Genetics.” 

Dr. Abraham Palmer gave a talk titled, “Using N/NIH heterogeneous stock (HS) rats to study the genetic basis of behavior,” at the IBANGS annual meeting on May 21. The International Behavioural and Neural Genetics Society annual meeting was held in Rochester, MN this year from May 17-21.

Dr. Sandra Sanchez-Roige recently presented her work titled, “Genome-wide association study meta-analysis of the Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test (AUDIT) in two population-based cohorts (N=141,958)” at 23andMe Genome Research Day. Her abstract was 1 of the 6 chosen to participate in the event.

Read the pre-print of this study here.

Former lab member Margaret Distler recently had a baby girl, named Hazel Nalini.

Congratulations, Margaret!

The NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) recently awarded the Scripps Research team two separate grants totaling $7.5 million. The five-year grants will allow the researchers, led by Dr. Olivier George, to combine next-generation sequencing with rodent behavioral screening in a genetically diverse, nonhuman animal model of drug addiction. They will also create shared tissue banks for other researchers to use in addiction-related studies.

Dr. George’s group will collaborate with the lab of Dr. Leah Catherine Solberg Woods at Wake Forest University, who will breed the rats, and the lab of Dr.

Former lab member Katherine McMurray recently had a baby girl, named Madeline Virginia.

Congratulations, Katherine!