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!

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!

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!

Ashley Crawley is named a 2020 McNair Scholar

We just learned that Ashley was accepted into the 2020 cohort for the Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate achievement program here at Rutgers and we couldn’t be more proud!

The McNair program is a very competitive program that helps students to pursue a doctoral degree by providing faculty mentoring, network building, support from other McNair Scholars and other professional development activities.

Ashley works incredibly hard and we can think of no one more deserving of such an honor.


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“Whether or not you reach your goals in life depends entirely on how well you prepare for them and how badly you want them. You're eagles! Stretch your wings and fly to the sky.”

– Ronald E. McNair

Barker Lab Senior Pavan Yecham Inspires new Freshman interested in Science and Health

Our Senior undergraduate, Pavan Yecham, just finished teaching his first college course with mentoring from Dr. Barker. The Rutgers First-Year Interest Group Seminars (FIGS) program allows exceptional Seniors like Pavan to create lesson plans, schedule laboratory tours, and to help quickly set new freshman off on their career paths. We were so happy to participate in this wonderful program and look forward to supporting it in the future.

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