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September 2024
Sarah Mott won best poster award at the annual UNC Pharmacology Retreat!
Graduate students Sarah Mott and Sarah Magee presented their work at the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies annual retreat!
August 2024
Melissa Herman was featured on an episode of Nick Jikomes’ podcast, titled “Sex Differences, Drugs & the Brain: Psychedelics, Psilocybin, Alcohol & Nicotine”!
The lab celebrated Maria Echeveste’s first day of graduate school!
July 2024
Undergraduate Shyenne Grady completed her summer research project with the Carolina Summer Fellowship Program, giving a poster presentation and talk on the effect of electronic nicotine vapor on social dominance behavior and neuronal activity!
June 2024
Sarah Magee published “Sex differences in basal motivated behavior, chronic ethanol drinking, and amygdala activity in female and male mice” in Alcohol.
April 2024
Undergraduates Margaret High and Mia Foglesong successfully defended their senior honors theses!
February 2024
Sarah Magee presented at the UNC Spring 2024 Neuroscience Seminar Series.
Gavin Schmitz successfully defended his dissertation, “Identifying the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying potential therapeutic effects of psychedelic compounds”!
Melissa Herman gave a talk at the University of Minnesota’s Medical Discovery Team on Addiction, titled “Region-specific effects of psilocin on neuronal activity and threat responding behavior”.
December 2023
Gavin Schmitz won the UNC Pharmacology Scholar Award!
November 2023
Devin Effinger successfully defended his dissertation, “Sex-specific effects of psychedelic drug administration on stress-related brain region reactivity and threat responding”!
September 2023
Melissa Herman gave a talk at the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies Seminar Series titled “Corticolimbic Actions of Alcohol and Drugs of Abuse”.
Melissa Herman is featured on the Science Vs podcast episode “Vaping: Is It Really That Bad?”
July 2023
Sema Quadir published “Chronic alcohol drinking drives sex-specific differences in affective behavior and medial prefrontal cortex activity in CRF1:Cre:tdTomato transgenic rats” in eNeuro.
April 2023
Undergraduate Mia Foglesong received the 2023 UNC Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Award!
Devin Effinger published “Sex-specific effects of psychedelic drug exposure on central amygdala reactivity and behavioral responding” in Nature.
Gavin Schmitz published “G protein-coupled receptors as targets for transformative neuropsychiatric therapeutics” in the American Journal of Physiology - Cell Physiology.
Sarah Mott Joined the lab as a graduate student!
Manhua Zhu successfully defended her dissertation, “Cellular and behavioral effects of nicotine vapor exposure on mouse mesolimbic reward circuitry”!
February 2023
Melissa Herman gave a talk at the Center for Clinical Pharmacology Seminar Series titled “Acute and Prolonged Effects of Psilocin on Cortical and Limbic Neuronal Activity and Threat Responding”.
November 2022
Devin Effinger was part of a panel organized by NIDA Titled “Drug Use, Addiction, and Recovery.”
Mia Foglesong was selected to present a poster at the State of North Carolina Undergraduate Research and Creativity Symposium! They will be presenting on December 3rd in Willmington.
October 2022
Maria Echeveste Sanchez published her first first-author paper titled “The effects of electronic nicotine vapor on voluntary alcohol consumption in female and male C57BL/6J mice” in Drug and Alcohol Dependence.
Sema Quadir presented her poster at the Gordon Research Seminar (GRS)/Gordon Research Conference (GRC): Alcohol & The Nervous System meeting in Oxnard, CA and received the Best Postdoc Poster Award at GRS.
September 2022
Gavin Schmitz gave an oral presentation at the 2022 UNC Pharmacology Retreat and won best oral presentation.
July 2022
Melissa Herman received tenure!
June 2022
Sema Quadir and Sarah Magee presented their research at the Research Society on Alcohol’s (RSA) 2022 meeting in Orlando, FL. They also received RSA Junior Investigator and Student Merit travel awards, respectively.
Sema Quadir’s F32 proposal titled “Physiological Consequences of Alcohol Exposure on CRF 1 Neurons in the Nucleus Tractus Solitarius” was funded on the first try!
May 2022
Sema received the NIH Outstanding Scholars in Neuroscience Award and will travel to Baltimore in November to accept the award.
April 2022
Congratulations to our awesome undergrad Gillian Arleth on successfully defending her honors thesis! She will also be presenting a poster on her senior research project on Wednesday, May 4th.
July 2021
Our amazing undergrad Jasmine Jahad presented her poster “Electronic Nicotine Vapor Exposure and Central Amygdala Activity in Mice” as part of the Carolina Summer Fellows program!
September 2021
Undergraduate Neil Rogers led the Herman Lab’s first journal club where he presented Ben Hamida et al 2015, Addiction Biology — a paper from Brigitte Kieffer’s lab examining the mu opioid receptor and alcohol reward!
October 2021
Congratulations to Gillian Arleth for getting her senior honors thesis research award!