By April Hunt
Emory Report
Rohan Palmer, an assistant professor of psychology in Emory College, started on the path to becoming a researcher as an undergraduate, when he worked in a lab studying whether female mice could overcome their anxiety to leave the safety of the nest to retrieve babies that he and other researchers had moved away.
Intriguingly, the work showed that some strains of mice performed very differently than others in overcoming their emotions to perform their motherly duties. Moreover, females exposed to more testosterone in the uterus performed worst at this and other maternal tasks.
“It was understanding behavior at its core,” says Palmer, now an expert in the field of behavioral genetics. “What helps us understand what makes us individuals better than looking at the environment and the biology?”
Palmer now runs his own behavioral genetics lab at Emory that turns that question to one of today’s most pressing issues: What makes some people addicted to drugs or alcohol, and not others?
His highly innovative approach, to find and characterize the layer of biology that combines with factors such as environment to find an answer, has earned him a 2017 Avenir Award for Genetics or Epigenetics of Substance Abuse Disorders (DP1) from the National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer Award program.
The five-year, $2.34 million award is among a handful of grants given to recognize “highly creative” scientists from the nation’s top universities and to encourage high-impact approaches to the broad area of biomedical and behavioral science.
“This is a special award, more so because very few beginning investigators receive this honor,” says Ronald Calabrese, the College’s senior associate dean for research.
Read more in Emory Report.
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