Category: People
Sarah Zerbi
Sarah Zerbi
Sarah Zerbi
Sarah Zerbi is an undergraduate research assistant at the lab. She is from Scotland and Malaysia and is a sophomore at Northeastern University studying nursing and nutrition. She has been working at the lab since September 2014.
Kelsey Landaverde
Kelsey Landaverde
Kelsey Landaverde
Kelsey Landaverde is an undergrad research assistant at Bryant Lab. She is from Selden on Long Island, New York and is a Junior at Boston University Sargent College studying Human Physiology. She has been working at the lab since September and this summer she will be participating in the UROP program at BU, studying conditioned placebo anxiolytic response in mice.
Kimberly Luttik
Kim Luttik
Kim Luttik
Kimberly Luttik, from Wilmington, Massachusetts, is currently a sophomore at Boston University. She is majoring in Human Physiology at Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences. She has been working at Dr. Camron Bryant’s Laboratory of Addiction Genetics as a laboratory assistant since January of 2014.
Olga Lacki
Olga Lacki
Olga Lacki
Olga Lacki hails from Chicago, Illinois. She is a Senior at Boston University studying Neuroscience and Visual Arts and plans to attend medical school after her undergraduate career. Prior to joining the laboratory in January 2014, she had an internship in the Mesenchymal Stem Cell laboratory in Dresden, Germany while studying abroad. Olga has also been working with Dr. Jacqueline Liederman of the Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory while at BU. She has received the UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program) grant 3 times since her time at the Addiction Genetics Laboratory and has been working with Lisa Goldberg on the Csnk1e project.
Michael Chau
Michael Chau
Michael Chau
Michael Chau is an undergraduate research assistant at the Laboratory of Addiction Genetics. He is a sophomore at Boston University studying human physiology with a minor in public health and interested in its intersection with sociology. He has been
working at the lab since 2014 and is mainly involved in data curation for mouse
behavioral analysis. He is also conducting comparative and historical research with
Dr. Joseph Harris on healthcare and its connection with sociology, public policy, and
global health. Michael is currently working towards his Bachelor’s degree and hopes
to use his degree as a stepping-stone to eventually enter the medical field as a
physician and as a sociological researcher.
Stacey Kirkpatrick
Stacey Kirkpatrick (Technician, Lab Manager)
Stacey Kirkpatrick (Technician, Lab Manager)
Stacey was a laboratory technician and the lab manager in the Laboratory of Addiction Genetics. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago in 2012 where she majored in comparative human development. During college, Stacey worked in Dr. Abraham Palmer’s Lab studying the genetics of fear and anxiety in mice. Stacey and Dr. Bryant worked in the same laboratory at the University of Chicago and as luck would have it, they both moved here at the same time – thus, Stacey was the ideal person for the position. She is currently about to start her first year of medical school in the fall.
Neema Yazdani
Neema Yazdani
(Biomolecular Pharmacology Graduate Student)
Neema Yazdani
(Biomolecular Pharmacology Graduate Student)
Neema currently is a second year Pharmacology doctoral student in department of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics at Boston University School of Medicine. Before coming to BU, Neema attended the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where he studied Physiology and Neuroscience for his Bachelor’s degree (2011) and Neuroscience for his Master’s degree (2012). From his second year through his graduate coursework at UCSD, Neema studied Innexin gap junction proteins in Hirudo medicinalis (the medicinal leech). During his undergraduate years, he participated the leech genome project, and localized the expression of newly discovered Innexin genes to specific neurons in the embryonic leech central nervous system. For his master’s coursework, Neema studied the functional relationship between invertebrate Innexins, and vertebrate Connexins and Pannexins through site-directed mutagenesis of pan-neuronally expressed Innexin 1 and glial expressed Innexin 2, eventually leading to his discovery of dominant negative gap junction mutants. Currently, Neema is pursuing is doctoral research with Dr. Camron Bryant in the Laboratory of Addiction Genetics. His research aim is to deduce which of four candidate genes is responsible for increased methamphetamine sensitivity in specific lines of mice. To do this, he will utilize customized transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs) to knockdown each target gene in mice, followed by experiments analyzing drug sensitivity, conditioned place preference, and primary neuron cultures to assess cellular underpinnings of behavior.
Lisa Goldberg
Lisa Goldberg
(Biomolecular Pharmacology Graduate Student)
Lisa Goldberg
(Biomolecular Pharmacology Graduate Student)
Lisa is a third year Biomedical Neuroscience doctoral candidate at Boston University in the Department of Pharmacology. She completed her undergraduate degree in Neuroscience, with a minor in Mathematics at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY. During her undergraduate career, Lisa worked closely with Dr. Holloway in the Psychology department studying the effects of play deprivation on oxytocin and neurogenesis in rats. Additionally, she completed a summer internship at Harvard’s New England Primate Research Center in Southborough, MA, where she worked with Dr. Gregory Miller investigating the role of trace -amine associated receptor 1 in a mouse model of methamphetamine abuse. During this time, Lisa also worked with Dr. Donna Platt training squirrel monkeys, Saimiri sciureus, in alcohol discrimination to study alcohol addiction. Lisa is currently completing her thesis work with Dr. Camron Bryant in the Laboratory of Addiction Genetics. Lisa’s work focuses on understanding the genetic underpinnings of behavioral traits associated with substance abuse by combining gene mapping with behavioral assays such as conditioned place preference. Currently, she is focusing on differentiating the opposing regulatory roles of the delta and epsilon isoforms of casein kinase 1 in sensitivity to drugs of abuse.
Camron Bryant
Camron Bryant, PhD.
Principal Investigator
Camron Bryant, PhD.
Principal Investigator
Camron D. Bryant completed his undergraduate degree in psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where he conducted an honors thesis project examining the genetic basis for phenotypic variation in the analgesic properties of acetaminophen (Tylenol®) in mice. Dr. Bryant earned his Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA in 2006 where he focused on signaling mechanisms and Pavlovian-conditioned properties of opioid adaptive behaviors. He completed his positions as a Postdoc and Research Associate in genetics at the University of Chicago (2007-2012) before joining the Department of Pharmacology at Boston University School of Medicine as Assistant Professor in the fall of 2012. Dr. Bryant has received numerous awards including the Achievement Award for College Scientists (ARCS), the International Behavioural and Neural Genetics Society (IBANGS) Outstanding Young investigator Award for Postdocs, and the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP) Travel Award. He serves as an ad hoc reviewer for several peer-reviewed journals in his field including Genes, Brain and Behavior, Psychopharmacology, Drug and Alcohol Dependence and is a Review Editor for Frontiers in Genetics.
