Ally Wins First Place Poster Award at AXON 6.0 Conference

Congrats to Allison (Ally) Bernstein for winning first place for Best Poster Presentation at the Nu Rho Psi AXON 6.0 Conference. Her poster, titled "Investigating the Effects of Cocaine Conditioning on Local Glutamatergic & GABAergic Neurons in the Lateral Preoptic Area," examined several neuronal populations in the LPO and explored their distinct roles in modulating the reinforcing properties of cocaine, providing a new understanding of the LPO's involvement in substance use disorders. 

Allison worked under the direction of former graduate student Jennifer Mejaes and was supported by a dedicated team of current and former Barker Lab members, including Olivia DePasquale, Kamila Sayed, Rithikaa Rajendran, and Chris O'Brien. 

Well done, Ally and Team!

Olivia DePasquale Publishes First-Author Paper on GPR151

Congratulations to Olivia DePasquale on the acceptance of her first first-author paper, “The Orphan Receptor GPR151: Discovery, Expression, and Emerging Biological Significance,” published in ACS Chemical Neuroscience. This timely review was written with key support from co-authors Chris O’Brien and Baila Gordon, who worked together over the past year to bring the paper to life.

The paper provides a comprehensive review of GPR151, a little-understood receptor found primarily in the brain’s habenula, spinal cord, and sensory neurons. GPR151 is thought to play a critical role in regulating pain, addiction, and mood, making it a promising target for future therapies aimed at treating chronic pain and substance use disorders. Olivia’s work synthesizes current research on GPR151’s structure, function, and potential as a drug target—laying important groundwork for the field.

Well done, team!

Daniel Soler Receives Henry Rutgers Scholar Award for Outstanding Honors Thesis in Psychology

Congratulations to Daniel Soler, who has been awarded the prestigious Henry Rutgers Scholar Award for his exceptional honors thesis in the Department of Psychology under the mentorship of Dr. David Barker. The Henry Rutgers Scholar Award is the highest distinction conferred by the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University for undergraduate research, recognizing graduating seniors who have completed outstanding independent research projects leading to a thesis in their major field of study .

Daniel's thesis exemplifies the highest standards of scholarship, demonstrating originality, critical reasoning, and scholarly achievement. His research was conducted under the guidance of graduate student Svetlana Bryant and supported by a dedicated team of current and former Barker Lab members, including Brooke Tenet, Justin Gusovious, Simrun Sobti, and Olivia DePasquale.

We celebrate Daniel's achievement and look forward to his future contributions to the field of psychology.

Rithikaa Wins Top Poster Award at NEURON Conference

Congratulations to Rithikaa for winning first place in the Nu Rho Psi Best Poster Presentation Award at the NEURON Conference, where her poster was selected from over 180 entries. Her project, titled "Differential Roles of LPO Glutamatergic and GABAergic Neurons in Modulating Cocaine Reward and Aversion: Implications for Cocaine Use Disorder," explored the opposing roles of distinct neuronal populations in cocaine-related behavior, offering new insights into the neural mechanisms underlying substance use disorders.

Rithikaa was mentored by former graduate student Jennifer Mejaes and supported by a dedicated team of students including Kamila Sayed, Pavan Yecham, and Allison Bernstein. The award recognized not only the quality of the research and presentation but also the presenter’s depth of knowledge and engagement with the scientific questions posed by the judges.

Great job Rithikaa and team!

Dr. Barker Pitches at the Institute for Life Science Entrepreneurship

The Institute for Life Science Entrepreneurship (ILSE) held a translational research competition on October 17th for scientists and entrepreneurs from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The inaugural competition took place at the NJ Center for Science, Technology, and Mathematics at Kean university and featured 10 teams of academic scientists from Rutgers, Princeton, Cornell, as well as several local startup companies.

The competition featured an incredible amount of scientific ingenuity from across the tri-state area and was attended by several in the local business community including BioNJ and the New Jersey Economic Development authority (NJEDA).

Barker Lab Honors Students Win Henry Rutgers Awards

Two of our 2023 Honors Thesis students, Sri Guttikonda and Roshni Vemireddy were awarded the Henry Rutgers Award. This award recognizes the top thesis students at Rutgers and is based off of superior performance in the execution of the honors thesis, as well as superior academic performance.

Sri was also awarded the William B. Foster Award recognizing academic and research performance from the Life Sciences Department.

Congrats Sri and Roshni!

Senior Dhruvi Desai Wins Poster Award

Dhruvi Desai, a senior in the Barker Lab, recently won second prize for her poster entitled “Whole Brain Mapping of Lateral Preoptic Area Inputs” at the axon 4.0 Conference. Dhruvi’s poster is the culmination of her hard and independent work on an anatomical tracing project in the laboratory over the past year. Congrats Dhruvi!

Axon is an undergraduate research conference organized by the Nu Rho Psi chapters at Rutgers and SUNY.

Grossman Innovation Prize

The Barker Lab was awarded the Grossman Innovation Prize. The Prize, named for Alan H. Grossman, provides funding for proof-of-concept studies that allow faculty innovators to develop product ideas with the hope that these nascent products might eventually transform into an independent business or attract venture capital funding.

Pilot Grant from The Rutgers Addiction Research Center

Dr. Barker and Dr. Zhiping Pang were awarded a pilot grant from the Rutgers Addiction Research Center. The award focuses on finding a novel chemical ligand to target the lateral habenula and to determine how long-term inhibition of the lateral habenula might contribute to pain relief and reinforcement.

Barker Lab awarded New Jersey Health Foundation Awaed

The Barker Lab was awarded a grant from the New Jersey Health Foundation entitled “Developing a Targeted Pharmacotherapy for Pain Without Abuse Liability”. The one-year pilot grant focuses on finding a new pharmacotherapy for pain that might replace opioid therapeutics.

Chris O'Brien Awarded Predoctoral Fellowship from NIDA

Barker Lab Graduate Student Chris O’Brien was recently awarded an F31 Predoctoral National Research Service Award (NRSA) from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). His project, entitled Molecular and Neuroanatomical Processes of Opioid addiction, focuses on how stress changes individual susceptibility to opioid abuse, as well as the behaviors that might help to predict this individual susceptibility.

Jennifer Mejaes accepted into the PhD to Industry Pathway Program

Barker Lab graduate student Jennie Mejaes was recently accepted into the Rutgers PhD Industry Pathways Program as part of the inaugural class.

The goal of the program is to help PhD students to pursue careers in industry by providing opportunities for professional development, specialized coursework, seminars, training in research techniques, and networking opportunities.

We’re excited to see the kinds of opportunities this will open for Jennie and other Rutgers PhD students. Congrats Jennie!

Our work with Elyssa Margolis is now Published!

A few months ago, we broke the news of a preprint with Elyssa Margolis’ lab at UCSF and Marisela Morales’ lab at NIDA. We’re now excited to say that this work has been published in Nature Communications.

In this work, we discovered that Mu-opioid agonists can drive analgesia by inhibiting the lateral habenula, and that this effect mainly relies on Mu-positive cells in the lateral preoptic area. What’s most important about this discovery, is that this analgesia requires the presence of ongoing pain. In other words, this circuit provides a mechanism only for pain relief, and does not support opioid reward. This provides an important way by which we might induce pain relief without worrying about many of the adverse effects of opioid treatments, including sedation, respiratory depression, or the risk for opioid abuse.

Check out our new paper on individual differences in opioid abuse susceptibilty!

The lab recently published a paper in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, led by graduate student Chris O’Brien along with support from undergraduate students Roshni Vemireddy and Uzma Mohammed.

In the paper, we use a large battery of behavioral tests to determine the types of behavioral predictors that might indicate which individuals are most prone to opioid abuse after taking opioids across a window of time similar to a prescription. As a part of this, we also examined the influence of individual history, examining how traumatic stress might change the relevant predictors. We discovered that a susceptibility to negative mood states was a key predictor in control mice, and that the phenotype shifted following traumatic stress, such that mice who developed paradoxically high reward seeking and low thresholds for pain were those most likely to exhibit heightened drug-seeking.

Our findings provide some key messages for thinking about patients at risk in clinical settings, suggesting that targeted testing or questions could provide insights into the individuals at the greatest risk for future opioid abuse.

Ashley Crawley receives Henry Rutgers Award

Senior Ashley Crawley was awarded the Henry Rutgers Award for her honors thesis entitled “The Neuroscience of Addiction: Longitudinal Changes in the Responses of the Brain’s Striatal Regions across Prolonged Drug Use.”

The Henry Rutgers Scholar Award recognizes graduating seniors who have completed outstanding independent research projects leading to a thesis. The award is the highest achievement at Rutgers for an honors thesis. Students receiving the award are recognized Rutgers wide in the commencement program and receive a substantial prize.

Senior Ashley Crawley Featured by the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences

Ashley Crawley, one of our star seniors, was recently interviewed by the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences about her Rutgers experience. Ashley will be leaving us soon to begin graduate school at UCLA with some amazing colleagues. We’re sad to see her leave, but excited to see all of the places she will go.

A new preprint with our collaborator Dr. Elyssa Margolis of UCSF is now available

Our latest preprint with Dr. Elyssa Margolis just went live this week at BioRxiv. In this paper we demonstrate that mu opioid receptors in the lateral habenula are important for driving pain relief and negative reinforcement. Moreover, we demonstrate for the first time that the primary input to the lateral habenula responsible for this pain relief is the lateral preoptic area (LPO) of the hypothalamus.

Neurons in the LPO responsible for signaling pain are glutamatergic, and these neurons appear to become sensitized in a mouse model of chronic pain. However, these signals can be blocked by inhibition at presynaptic mu opioid receptors. What is particularly exciting about this story is that the lateral preoptic- lateral habenula pathway can drive pain relief, but does not appear to support positive reinforcement and may therefore be an important target for driving pain relief without the liability for opioid addiction.

The Barker Lab's First Pre-print is Live!

The first preprint from the Barker Lab was released this week. This paper describes our development of analysis software for Fiber Photometry imaging of calcium and neurotransmitter sensors.

The software for the photometry Modular Analysis Tool (pMAT) can be found via the GitHub Link.

New Collaborative Paper out in Neuron

Today our collaborative paper with the Morales Lab at the National Institute on Drug Abuse was released in Neuron.

This work demonstrates the importance of an excitatory projection from the Lateral Hypothalamic Area to the Ventral Tegmental Area in producing innate defensive behaviors. The paper is a true tour-de-force by first author Flavia Barbano! We’re so excited to see this work finally in press!

A Flurry of Summer Fellowships

While the Barker Lab has been hit hard in many ways by the COVID-19 crisis, we’ve also recently had a lot to be thankful for!

In addition to the McNair Fellowship earned by returning student Ashley Crawley, we recently learned that returning Lab member Uzma Mohammed and new lab member Kaitlyn Caballero were both awarded Cooper Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships! This fellowship is a generous gift from Dr. Dorothy Cooper in memory of her husband David Cooper that supports students majoring in Psychology as they pursue summer research. In addition, new lab student Samantha Rozario was awarded an Aresty Summer Research Fellowship. These fellowships are part of an endowment from Jerome and Lorraine Aresty to encourage undergraduate research at Rutgers New Brunswick.

These fellowships are especially precious this summer and we are incredibly grateful for the support!