Author Archives: Brooke Mansfield

BCAS congratulates Dr. Markus Heilig for winning the 2019 Bowles Lectureship Award.  The Bowles Award is given annually to honor a distinguished researcher who has made significant contributions to our understanding of the causes, prevention and/or treatment of alcoholism and alcohol abuse. Dr. Heilig presented a lecture entitled “How we...

Led by Brennon Luster and Liz Cogan, examining how repeated morphine withdrawal alters behavior and inhibitory synapses in male and female mice, published in Addiction Biology. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/adb.12748   Viewpoint led by Karl Schmidt describing new developments in distinguishing dopamine and norepinephrine with various  techniques published in ACS Chemical Neuroscience. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acschemneuro.9b00157...

  Led by A. Leslie Morrow, PhD, research shows how new compounds could target specific brain cell receptors to treat a wide variety of conditions, such as alcoholism, Alzheimer’s, depression, and posttraumatic stress. For the first time, scientists discovered how neuroactive steroids naturally found in the brain and bloodstream inhibit...

The Director is allocated first. All remaining permits are assigned first to tenured and tenure-track faculty and then to other permanent staff based on duration of total state service. There is no distinction made between EHRA research faculty and SHRA staff. The Director will exercise his or her authority to...

Monday Jan 25th Zoe McElligott, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Alcohol and Amygdalar Circuits” Monday Feb 15th Leon Coleman, M.D., Ph.D., Research Assistant Professor, Department of Pharmacology, Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies, The University of North...

Dr. Clyde Hodge receives NIH grant supplement to develop research on Alzheimer’s disease and Alzheimer’s-related dementias. Dr. Hodge has received a 1-yr grant through the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) to supplement his currently funded R37 MERIT award from the...

“The part of the brain that is doing most of the heavy lifting to encode new memory is called the hippocampus,” said Scott Swartzwelder, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University. “It’s a structure that happens to be very, very sensitive to alcohol.”

Neurotensin and Dynorphin Bi-Directionally Modulates CeA Inhibition of oval BNST Neurons in Male Mice (in press at Neuropharmacology, authors are Catherine P Normandeau, Maria Luisa Torruella Suarez, Philippe Sarret, Zoe McElligott*, Eric C Dumont*, *co-senior author ) Stress-induced alterations of norepinephrine release in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis of mice (in press at ACS Chemical Neuroscience, authors are Karl T Schmidt, Viren H Makhijani, Kristen...

Drs. Joyce Besheer and Scott Parnell received a two-year grant from NIAAA titled “Consequences of prenatal alcohol and cannabinoid co-exposure on alcohol self-administration in adolescence”. These studies will investigate the lasting impact of prenatal alcohol and synthetic cannabinoid exposure on alcohol drinking in the adolescent offspring.

Dr. Joyce Besheer received a Diversity Supplement from NIAAA to support the postdoctoral training of Dr. Laura Ornelas. Dr. Ornelas will be investigating the neural mechanisms that underlie the effects of trauma exposure on relapse to alcohol drinking in an animal model.