Mentors

Dr. Dipak K. Sarkar is the founding director of the Endocrine Program and the PI of the MNADRT program team. Dr. Sarkar’s lab is presently determining whether ethanol exposure during early development activates microglial cells to control the production of inflammatory cytokines and neuron killing following ethanol treatment. Dr. Sarkar has also discovered that rodent offspring born from alcoholic mothers have developed breast, prostate and pituitary tumors. The cause for the increased cancer susceptibility may relate to their stress axis abnormality and the functional deficit of beta-endorphin neurons in the brain. Dr. Sarkar’s group has developed a groundbreaking method to prepare beta-endorphin neurons from stem cells. Excitingly, transplanting beta-endorphin cells into the brain of animals reduces the stress hyperresponsiveness and suppresses tumor growth and development. His group is currently conducting mechanistic studies to establish the potential use of beta-endorphin cell therapy in the prevention of these diseases. Dr. Sarkar is also determining the genome wide changes in epigenetic machinery responsible for various neuroendocrine pathologies in fetal alcohol exposed animals. Sarkar’s lab recently identified that the epigenetic effect of fetal alcohol exposure on proopiomelanocortin gene controlling stress and immune functions transmits through generation via male germline.

Dr. Gary Aston-Jones is the Associate Director of the MNADRT program, Inaugural Director of the Brain Health Institute at Rutgers University and Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences, and the Murray and Charlotte Strongwater Endowed Chair in Neuroscience and Brain Health. Dr. Aston-Jones’s research focuses on the neural mechanisms of motivated behavior and examines the roles of ascending brain monoamine and peptide systems in addiction and cognitive processes. His studies use neurophysiology, neuroanatomy, and behavioral neuropharmacology techniques in anesthetized and behaving rats, along with optogenetics, chemogenetics, and behavioral economics methods to advance the study of these systems in behavior. He and his colleagues have described a role for the brain noradrenergic locus coeruleus system in arousal, decision, and behavioral flexibility, as well as a key role for the orexin/hypocretin neuropeptide system in motivation and addiction.

Dr. Bates is Distinguished Professor and Vice Chair of Research in the Department of Kinesiology and Health in the Division of Life Science at Rutgers–New Brunswick. She is the Director of the Cardiac Neuroscience Laboratory at the Center of Alcohol & Substance Use Studies, Vice-Chair of the Arts and Sciences Institutional Review Board, and Senior Member of the Brain Health Institute. Dr. Bates’s laboratory promotes translation between basic human experimental research and clinical science. Her transdisciplinary research program seeks to understand integrated brain-body mechanisms of behavior change and to build novel intervention and prevention approaches to harmful alcohol use and other bio-behavioral problems based on neurocognitive and neurocardiac mechanisms of behavior change. Her approach is informed by neuroscience, yet uses behavioral techniques, rather than drug therapies, to support flexible adaptation to the environment and sustain health. She conducts collaborative research and mentoring with other psychologists, neuroscientists, physiologists, exercise scientists, and computational modelers.

I am a translational and transdisciplinary research scientist in alcohol studies. My research focuses on understanding how physiological systems interfere with or support cognitive planning and conscious intentions to change maladaptive lifestyle choices (e.g., drinking more than intended) and addictive behavior. Ongoing studies in our laboratory examine how physiological systems, especially the cardiovascular system, can be used to broaden our understanding and definitions of alcohol-related risks, the stress-drinking relationship, and real-time relapse prevention.

Denise Hien, PhD, ABPP, is the Director of the Center of Alcohol & Substance Use Studies, and Professor in the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology (GSAPP) at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She and her group have conducted programmatic research on women’s mental health and addictions, with continuous funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and National Institute on Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse for over 20 years. Considered a leader in the field, her body of work has contributed to the evidence base on the treatment of individuals with trauma-related psychiatric disorders and their comorbidity with addictions, through conducting single- and multi-site clinical trials across the United States in community-based substance abuse treatment settings. She also currently leads a NIDA R25 training grant for translational addiction research for racial/ethnic minority BS/MD, MA and PhD candidates in the biomedical and social sciences.

One focus is Tourette disorder (TD), a neuropsychiatric condition characterized by verbal and motor tics and occurring in about 1 in 150 children. We analyzed at the molecular level inherited variants of specific genes in large TD families using neurons differentiated from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) derived by genetically reprogramming cells from our TD subjects. Taking an alternative approach, our “TIC Genetics” collaborative group continues to discover and characterize new gene mutations that arise in the TD children of unaffected parents. We aim to understand how these new gene variants function on a cellular level by comparing iPSC-derived neurons from affected and unaffected individuals. At the same time, we examine behavior, neuroanatomy, and neurophysiology of mice engineered with novel gene editing methods to have mutations identical to those new mutations discovered in TD children.

Dr. Sulie L. Chang is an adjunct professor of the Graduate Program in Endocrinology and Animal Biosciences, Rutgers Graduate School. She is the founding director of the Institute of NeuroImmune Pharmacology (INIP) and a professor of biological sciences and neuroscience at Seton Hall University (SHU). Dr. Chang has been studying the bi-directional interactions between the nervous and immune systems in health and disease including addiction and neuroAIDS. Her current research topics include correction of HIV-mediated behavioral disorders by excising the virus using CRISPR techniques, repairment of blood–brain barrier damage by HIV and addictive substances, involvement of methylation in binge exposure to ethanol-mediated spleen atrophy in adolescence, modulation of OPRM1 alternative splicing by morphine and HIV-1 underlying opioid abuse and dependence in people living with HIV/AIDS on combination anti-retroviral therapy, alcohol use and pain management, and the contribution of binge drinking to opioid use disorders.

To investigate neuronal mechanisms underlying gene variants associated with alcohol use disorders, we created human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) from selected subjects from the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA). In collaboration with Dr. Jay Tischfield of the Rutgers Human Genetics Institute, Dr. Zhiping Pang of the Rutgers Child Health Institute, and Dr. Paul Slesinger of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai, we currently focus on a KCNJ6 potassium channel variant associated with risk of alcoholism. Earlier work identified neuronal functional differences due to a variant of the CHRNA5 gene (Oni et al., 2016), associated with nicotine addiction. Another study focused on variants of the OPRM1 mu-opioid receptor genes (Halikere et al., 2019).

My laboratory studies the neural basis of the regulation of addiction, feeding, metabolism and obesity. Our current research program composes of three different aspects: 1) using human neurons derived from pluripotent stem cells as a model system to study the pathophysiology of neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders; 2) understanding the molecular mechanism of synaptic regulation by peptidergic hormones in the brain; and 3) developing novel technologies to advance the elucidation of the function and structure of the brain. My overall goal is to unravel the molecular and cellular mechanism underlying neuromodulation using both mouse and human neurons as model systems. Using interdisciplinary techniques in mouse models, we have studied the functions of several peptides including Glucagon like peptide-1 (GLP-1), leptin, and Melanin concentrating hormone (MCH) in the brain. In human neurons, we have focused on how Mu opioid receptor variants modulate synaptic transmission. Additionally, we are developing novel technologies such as microNeurocircuitry as well as optical sensors for detecting neuropeptide release. Our research is supported by NIH and other research foundations.

Research in my lab examines the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the development of dependence to alcohol and other drugs of abuse (opioids, nicotine, cocaine, cannabis, etc.) and the related issues, such as pain, anxiety, and depression. Gaining an understanding of these issues will necessarily involve determining which neural circuits mediate these processes, what physiological and synaptic mechanisms underlie circuit function and plasticity, and what neural and synaptic molecules play key parts in synaptic, neuronal, and circuit function. We use an array of rodent models and a variety of behavioral, electrophysiological, cellular, molecular, biochemical, and circuit-based techniques to test our scientific questions. Our goals are to understand CNS function in health and disease and to identify ways to rescue neuropathology associated with CNS disease states.

Dr. Danielle Dick is the Inaugural Director of the Rutgers Addiction Research Center (RARC), the Greg Brown Endowed Chair in Neuroscience, and a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. Dr. Dick’s research focuses on how genetic and environmental factors contribute to patterns of substance use and related disorders across development. Her projects include gene identification studies, with focus on impulsivity and externalizing outcomes; longitudinal studies that aim to map the risk associated with identified genetic variants across development and in conjunction with the environment; and the development of more tailored, personalized prevention and intervention programs based on genetic findings. She also does work with families, children and youth, and in the area of recovery. The overarching goal of her program of research is to integrate basic etiological research with prevention/intervention efforts to reduce rates of risky substance use and related problems in our society.