This Project Grant award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) under the Drug Use and Addiction Research Programs (CFDA 93.279) provides $162,672 to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to conduct research on the role of dopamine projections to the amygdala in goal-directed and habit learning. The research aims to characterize the function of dopaminergic pathways from the ventral tegmental area to the basolateral and central amygdala, and their necessity for...
This $373,300 federal Project Grant award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) under the Drug Use and Addiction Research Programs (CFDA 93.279) will support research to investigate the role of the nucleus accumbens, a key brain region involved in reward learning and addiction, in discriminating between cues associated with rewards versus neutral cues. The research aims to enhance understanding of the neural dynamics underlying selective conditioned responses to reward-predictive...
This $232,128 federal Project Grant award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), under the Drug Use and Addiction Research Programs (CFDA 93.279), will support research characterizing the role of dopaminergic and glutamatergic signaling mechanisms in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and their influence on dynamic drug-seeking behaviors in addiction. The research aims to 1) measure in vivo dopamine transmission and activity of BLA D1-neurons during cocaine self-administration to...
This Project Grant award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), under the Drug Use and Addiction Research Programs (CFDA 93.279), will provide $148,403 to the University of Washington to conduct research on the role of basolateral amygdala ensembles in avoidance behavior. The key objectives of this 2-year research project are: 1) to determine how functional antagonism of valence-selective neural ensembles in the basolateral amygdala is generated, 2) to identify how these...
This is a federal Project Grant award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), under the Drug Use and Addiction Research Programs (CFDA 93.279). The $1,838,237 award supports research to investigate how chronic stress influences the neural circuits controlling goal-directed behavior versus habit formation. The project aims to expose the specific amygdala-striatal pathways through which chronic stress can promote premature habit learning, which is a key mechanism underlying substance use...
The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) awarded a $417,861 Project Grant under the Drug Use and Addiction Research Programs (CFDA 93.279) to the Regents of the University of Minnesota, effective September 15, 2024. This grant will fund a 5-year research project investigating the neural mechanisms underlying individual differences in reward-based learning strategies and their relationship to addiction-like behaviors. The project will focus on the role of dopamine signaling in the...
The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) awarded a 5-year, $1,909,044 Project Grant under the Drug Use and Addiction Research Programs (CFDA 93.279) to The Washington University in St. Louis. The grant supports research to understand how neural circuits in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) support adaptive choice behavior and produce choice biases related to drug abuse disorders. The project has three main goals: 1) examining whether functional clusters of OFC neurons correspond to specific...
This federal Project Grant award of $154,091.00 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) under the Drug Use and Addiction Research Programs (CFDA 93.279) supports research at Georgetown University to investigate the role of chloride homeostasis and GABA neuron plasticity in the ventral tegmental area during reward learning. The research aims to characterize changes in the expression of the anion transporter KCC2 and its impact on inhibitory circuit dynamics that influence...
This $2,055,184 Project Grant was awarded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) under the Mental Health Research Grants program (CFDA 93.242) with an award date of July 11, 2024 and an ultimate completion date of January 31, 2029. The grant supports research to understand the role of prefrontal dopamine circuits in threat avoidance learning, with the goal of informing treatments for psychiatric disorders characterized by maladaptive avoidance behaviors. The research will use...
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), through its Office of Research Administration division, has been awarded a $432,500 Exploratory/Developmental Research Grant (R21) from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) under the Mental Health Research Grants program (CFDA 93.242). The goal of this 2-year project is to use amygdala slice electrophysiology to examine the specific neural inputs and molecular mechanisms responsible for the enhanced excitatory drive in the basolateral...
This $235,816 Project Grant award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) under the Drug Use and Addiction Research Programs (CFDA 93.279) supports research to examine the role of the basolateral amygdala in encoding inhibitory reward associations. The research aims to reveal the neural mechanisms by which cues in the environment come to predict the absence of specific rewards, which is critical for adaptive decision-making but understudied. The grant recipient, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), will conduct this research in the Wassum Lab to determine the temporal dynamics of basolateral amygdala activity during inhibitory association learning, assess whether basolateral amygdala activity is necessary and sufficient for encoding these associations, and examine the role of projections from the lateral orbitofrontal cortex to the basolateral amygdala in this process. The findings from this project are expected to provide novel insights into the basolateral amygdala's function and facilitate future research mapping the neural circuitry underlying inhibitory control over behaviors.