LSU Office of Research - While almost all research on addiction to stimulants (such as meth and cocaine) remains focused on dopamine and the body’s pleasure-and-reward system, a researcher at LSU Health Shreveport, Nicholas Goeders, took a different approach. Instead of reward, he looked at stress.

The December Graduate Student of the Month is Tyler Reekes.  Tyler entered the lab of Dr. Elizabeth Disbrow in the Department of Pharmacology, Toxicology & Neuroscience in the summer of 2017.  His dissertation project is titled, “Sex specific cognitive differences in age-related neurodegenerative diseases”.

PRNewswire — JanOne Inc. (Nasdaq: JAN), a company focused on developing treatments for conditions that cause severe pain and drugs with non-addictive, pain-relieving properties, today announced the appointment of Nicholas E. Goeders, Ph.D. to its Scientific Advisory Board (SAB). Dr. Goeders is considered one of the world’s leaders on the role of stress in drug addiction.

Kevin S. Murnane, PhD, was awarded the NINDS grant for the research project entitled, “Exploring the Role of Oxytocin in the Regulation of Neuronal Excitability,” is focused on form of catastrophic childhood epilepsy called Dravet syndrome.

Dr. Xiao-Hong Lu, Assistant Professor of Pharmacology, Toxicology and Neuroscience, received a $750,000 grant from NASA Biological and Physical Sciences Division’s Space Biology Program to develop a novel genetic engineering technology to evaluate the impact of space radiation on the human brain.

Dr. Xiao-Hong Lu’s research team will use the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory (NSRL) at Brookhaven National Laboratory to simulate cosmic radiation in space vehicles and on the Martian surface to determine if long-term exposure to radiation causes adverse consequences to the brain.

Nicholas Goeders, PhD, was honored with the Wayne Drewry Award by the Council on Alcoholism & Drug Abuse of Northwest Louisiana for his work in the field of addiction.

Congratulations to Dr. Arrigo De Benedetti, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and Dr. Nadejda Korneeva, Assistant Professor of Emergence Medicine, who have been awarded an intramural COVID-19 grant in amount of $50,000.

One of the most important populations to genetic researchers is right here in Louisiana? It’s the Acadians. Dr. Xiao-hong Lu, a researcher at LSU Health Shreveport, talks about Gene Editing in this episode of "The Gene & The Acadians".

LSUHS leadership, faculty, staff, students and community supporters recently honored the continued growth of research initiatives and funding at the second annual Research Celebration event held on February 25, 2020.