Dr. Amanda Barkley-Levenson has been promoted to Assistant Project Scientist. The appointment began on December 1st. Congratulations, Amanda!

The article, “Polygenic contributions to alcohol use and alcohol use disorders across population-based and clinically ascertained samples,” has been accepted for publication in Psychological Medicine. Drs. Abraham Palmer and Sandra Sanchez Roige are co-authors along with Emma Johnson, Laura Acion, Kathleen Bucholz, Grace Chan, Michael Chao, David Chorlian, Danielle Dick, Howard Edenberg, Tatiana Foroud, Victor Hesselbrock, Sivan Kinreich, John Kramer, I C Kuo, Samuel Kuperman, Dongbing Lai, Jacquelyn Meyers, Martin Henry Plawecki, Bernice Porjesz, Marc Schuckit, Jinni Su, Yong Zhang, Mark James Adams, Caroline Hayward, Jon Heron, Matthew Hickman, Kenneth

Khai Nguyen joined the Palmer Lab in December 2019 as a laboratory assistant. He graduated from UCI with a Bachelor of Science in Biological Sciences. He enjoys the research aspect of genetics in medicine and wishes to enter the medical field in the future. He likes adventuring, cycling, hiking, and road trips.

Welcome, Khai!

The article, “Nociceptin attenuates the escalation of oxycodone self-administration by normalizing CeA-GABA transmission in highly addicted rats” has been accepted for publication in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Dr. Abraham Palmer is a co-author on the article.

The article, “Assessing the motivational effects of ethanol in mice using a discrete-trial current-intensity intracranial self-stimulation procedure,” has been accepted for publication in Drug and Alcohol Dependence. Drs. Amanda Barkley-Levenson and Abraham Palmer are co-authors along with Andre Der-Avakian.

Drs. Amelie Baud and Sandra Sanchez-Roige presented at the 2019 World Congress of Psychiatric Genetics in Los Angeles, CA earlier this week.

Dr. Baud presented a talk entitled “Genetic effects from the social environment” in which she presented evidence that mouse and rat behaviours relevant to psychiatric disorders can be affected not only by the animal’s own genes but also by genes of cage mates. She also illustrated how such “indirect genetic effects” can be leveraged to dissect the mechanisms of social effects, more precisely to identify traits of social partners

The article titled “Genome-wide associations reveal human-mouse genetic convergence and modifiers of myogenesis, CPNE1 and STC2” has been accepted for publication in The American Journal of Human Genetics. Drs. Palmer and Riyan Cheng are co-authors along with Arimantas Lionikas, Ana Isabel Hernández Cordero, Natalia Gonzales, Clarissa Parker, David John Vandenbergh, Mark Abney, Andrew Skol, Alex Douglas, and Jenny Gregory. Find  the full article here.

Dr. Palmer was recently quoted in an article about genes and personality in the German magazine “NZZ Folio.” Find the full article here.

Dr. Abraham Palmer was a panelist on the professional development workshop: Bringing Genetic Diversity to Neuroscientific Research at the 2019 Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago. The title of his talk was “Genetic Diversity is All Around you!”