Research News

Bradley K. Taylor, PhD; Abigail Hellman, PhD; Tyler Nelson; Aman Mahajan, MD, PhD, MBA; and Kimberly Howard-Quijano, MD, MS, FASE, were awarded $50,000 for their project “A Non-Invasive Nasal Spray to Treat Neuropathic Pain.”

Congratulations to principal investigators Sean P. Farris, PhD, and Gregg E. Homanics, PhD, who will receive U01 funding from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism for the project “Epigenetic Regulation of Neuroimmune Pathways.”

Siamak Salavatian, PhD, will present the poster “Spinal Cord Stimulation Mitigates the Myocardial Ischemia Induced Sympathoexcitation by Suppressing the Spinal Neural Synchrony and Intermediolateral Nucleus Hyperactivity” at the Experimental Biology annual meeting in Philadelphia, PA on April 4.

Sonja received an F31 predoctoral fellowship award from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism for her project “LncRNA Gas5 Dysregulation Alters Ethanol Drinking Behavior and Ethanol-Related Phenotypes.”

Charles Lin, MD, was accepted into the Pitt Ventures First Gear Program for his device concept, the Ignite Safe Electrocautery Pen to reduce operating room fires.

Annalisa Baratta from the lab of Gregg E. Homanics, PhD, and co-mentored by Sean P. Farris, PhD, received an F31 predoctoral fellowship award from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism for her project “The Role of lncRNA MALAT1 in Controlling Behavior and Neuroinflammation in Alcohol Use Disorder.”

A paper from the lab of Pei Tang, PhD, “Structures of Highly Flexible Intracellular Domain of Human α7 Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptor,” was published in the high-impact journal Nature Communications.

The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) of the National Institutes of Health has notified us that our National Research Service Award Institutional Research Training Grant (T32) will be continuously funded for a fourth five-year term, with an increase of training slots from three to four positions beginning July 1, 2022.

Congratulations to Gregg E. Homanics, PhD, who was recently named a Specialty Chief Editor for the section Methods and Model Organisms for the journal Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience.

A paper from the labs of Yan Xu, PhD, and Pei Tang, PhD, in partnership with collaborators at Temple University, University of Pennsylvania, and Shanghai Jiaotong University, was published this month in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.