Abraham Palmer featured on The Best of Our Knowledge

As always, host Bob Barrett selects an Academic Minute to air during The Best of Our Knowledge.

Each week this program examines some of the issues unique to college campuses, looks at the latest research, and invites commentary from experts and administrators from all levels of education.

For this week‘s edition (#1395), Bob has selected Abraham Palmer’s segment on genes and loneliness. Dr. Palmer, professor of psychiatry at the University of California San Diego, examines if a tendency for loneliness can be found in your genes.

My research examines the influence of genes on behavior and reflects my training in behavioral neuroscience, molecular biology, pharmacology and quantitative genetics. I am currently pursuing research projects that use mice, ratsand humans. A major focus of my work has been on developing and refining methods for genome wide association studies (GWAS) in model organisms and integrating these results with expression QTLs (eQTL) to identify specific and testable hypotheses about the role of genes in behavioral and other traits. My lab is currently studying several genes that we identified using these methods with the goal of gaining novel mechanistic and biological insights. My work in humans focuses on intermediate phenotypes, such as amphetamine sensitivity and delay discounting and seeks to use polygenic methods to examine overlap with psychiatric diseases and to translate findings between humans and model organisms in which these same traits can be examined.

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