2020 MDT on Addiction Pilot Grant Awards fund three proposals

The MDT on Addiction awarded $100,000 each to three teams through its 2020 Pilot Grant Awards. The funded teams are as follows:

• VTA Dopamine Connectivity and Functional Responses to Drugs of Abuse: Zhe Chen, PhD, Assistant Professor, Neuroscience, and Robert Meisel, PhD, Professor, Neuroscience

• Neurobehavioral Impacts of Medical Cannabis Treatment in Chronic Pain Patients: Monica Luciana, PhD, Professor, Psychology, and Angela Birnbaum, PhD, Professor, Experimental & Clinical Pharmacology

• A Flexible Genome Modification Platform for Investigating Mechanisms of Cue Reactivity in Addiction: Jocelyn Richard, PhD, Assistant Professor, Neuroscience, and Kevin Wickman, PhD, Professor, Pharmacology

The purpose of the pilot grant program is to fund transformative faculty research to generate preliminary data for external grant submissions. Nineteen outstanding proposals involving 41 investigators in 18 departments were submitted this year.