Twenty of the world's leading statistical and behavioral geneticists will be in Boulder to teach a weeklong workshop (March 5-9) organized by IBG. This annual event is funded by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. It regularly attracts 100 researchers from Colorado, the USA, and around the world to come to Boulder to learn state-of-the-art methods for studying the genetics of health and behavior in twins and families.
THE 2012 INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON STATISTICAL GENETICS AND METHODOLOGY OF TWIN AND FAMILY STUDIES
Their prize winning paper on `Genetic variation in the murine lifespan response to dietary restriction: from life extension to life shortening' showed that there is marked genetic variation in the effects of dietary restriction, generally assumed to extend lifespan. In fact, in many genotypes, dietary restriction actually shortens rather than extends lifespan. (This will be good news for some of us).
Liao CY, Rikke BA, Johnson TE, Diaz V, Nelson JF. Genetic variation in the murine lifespan response to dietary restriction: from life extension to life shortening. Aging Cell. 2010 Feb;9(1):92-5.
Congratulations to Postdoctoral Fellow Alex Mendenhall and his colleagues,
whose paper in the Journal of Gerontology is highlighted in Science (June
17th) as an Editor's Choice paper under the heading 'Live long and
procreate'.
Read the Editor's Choice column
At this year's meeting of the Behavior Genetics Association, the Fulker Award for best paper published in the journal Behavior Genetics during 2010 was presented to IBG Faculty Fellow, Matt Keller (Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience), Sarah Medland of the Queensland Institute for Medical Research, and Laramie Duncan, a graduate student in clinical psychology and the IBG graduate program. Their paper, "Are extended twin family designs worth the trouble? A comparison of the bias, precision, and accuracy of parameters estimated in four twin family models" provided a rigorous guide to these issues in the classical twin design and three extended twin family designs used in human behavior genetics.
Congratulations to Matt, Sarah, and Laramie for this outstanding contribution to behavior genetics research.
Congratulations to Melissa Munn-Chernoff and her mentor, Mike Stallings, on Melissa's being named co-recipient of the 2011 Dozier Award for the most outstanding graduate student in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.
Melissa successfully defended her thesis on `Genetic and Environmental Risk Factors for Disordered Eating and Co-Occurring Traits' last week, and will take up a postdoctoral fellowship at Washington University, St. Louis, in the Dept. of Psychiatry.
In the Office of Planning and Budget's most recent unit profile, IBG ranks first out of all 60 units surveyed at CU Boulder for the average number of refereed publications per faculty member over the past seven years.
See: page 8, Table of Seven years of activity in research, scholarship, and creative work - of TTT individuals affiliated with this unit as of 10-1-2009
Behavior Genetics ranked 5th out of 355 psychology journals
A recently developed metric for evaluating journal influence is the SJR indicator which 'measures the scientific influence of the average article in a journal, it expresses how central to the global scientific discussion an average article of the journal is.' The indicator is based on the methodology of Google PageRank.
See the rankings for 335 psychology journals.
Behavior Genetics is ranked 5th out of 335 journals, behind only the Annual Review of Psychology, Psychological Bulletin, Psychological Review and Psychological Science
Behavior Genetics was founded in 1970 by IBG faculty, John DeFries and the late Steven Vandenberg, and is currently edited by IBG's Director, John Hewitt.
IBG receives record research funding in FY 2010!
During the year ended June 30th 2010, IBG received 48 research grant awards totalling $13,614,178. The dollar amount is a new record for IBG and is a tribute to the outstanding efforts of all who contribute to the work of Institute --- faculty, staff, researchers, and students.
Read The Annual Report of Sponsored Projects.
Research from Marissa Ehringer's lab was recently highlighted in the Colorado Arts & Sciences Magazine.
Read the Article
Tom Johnson has won the American Aging Association's 2010 Denham Harman
Research Award for lifetime achievement in research. Established in 1978
this award was named in honor of Dr. Denham Harman, a co-founder of the
American Aging Association and honors a person who has made significant
contributions to biomedical aging research. This recognizes Tom and his
research group's outstanding contributions to the scientific understanding
of aging.
John Hewitt received this year's faculty research award from
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the department's commencement
ceremony on May 6th, 2010.
Jay Schulz-Heik is the recipient of the Dozier Award for the best graduate
student in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. Jay is
supervised by Soo Rhee in the clinical and behavior genetics programs and
is currently an intern at the Palo Alto VA Medical Center.
Tom Johnson has received the Spring 2010 Boulder Faculty
Assembly Award for Excellence in Research, Scholarly and Creative Work
This award is presented for work of high quality that does not receive recognition through the usual channels. For instance, nominations for interdisciplinary research, work accomplished with undergraduate students, or an integrated long-term achievement are particularly invited.
Research by Marissa Ehringer's group on human behavioral associations with
polymorphisms in the nicotinic receptor genes is featured prominently in the December edition of NIDA Notes.
The studies use resources from several of IBG's research collaborations, including the Drug Research Center, the National Youth Survey Family Study, and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.
Tom Johnson has been elected as a fellow of the American Society for the
Advancement of Science (AAAS) in recognition of his distinguished
contributions in developing the Caenorhabditis elegans model for
understanding the genetics of longevity and identifying genes associated
with increased longevity and stress resistance.
Other current IBG Faculty Fellows who have previously been elected as
fellows of the AAAS are John DeFries and Bruce Pennington.'
Al Collins, has been selected to receive the 2009 Boulder Faculty
Assembly Award for Excellence in Research, Scholarly and Creative Work.
The FBAT/PBAT short course will be held on June 11th and 12th at IBG. For more information and to register, please visit the course website
Tom Johnson, Faculty Fellow of the Institute for Behavioral Genetics and
Professor of Integrative Physiology, CU Boulder, has been selected as the 2009
winner of the Schober Award for research on aging awarded by the Martin-Luther
University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. Prof. Johnson will give the keynote
address at their September 2009 meeting on biomarkers of aging.
Prof. John Hewitt, IBG's Director, received the Dobzhansky Award for
outstanding lifetime research accomplishment in the field of behavioral
genetics. The award was conferred at the Annual Meeting of the Behavior
Genetics Association in Louisville, Kentucky, June, 2008.
Prof. Greg Carey, an IBG Faculty Fellow, received the James Shields Award
for outstanding contributions to twin research. This award is conferred by
the Behavior Genetics Association and the International Society for Twin
Studies in honor of James Shields, a pioneering researcher in human
behavior genetics. The award recognizes both methodological and
substantive contributions to the study of twins and is the premier
scientific award for twin research.
Jen Wilking, a graduate student in Jerry Stitzel's lab, has been awarded a NRSA pre-doctoral fellowship from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Mike Stallings and Matt McQueen have been awarded research grants from the CU-Boulder Vice Chancellor for Research's Innovative Seed Grant Program. This competitive program was instituted "to involve new initiatives and take investigators in creative, and sometimes high-risk/reward directions; and, have tangible payoffs in terms of future funding, scholarly or artistic impact, and development of new collaborations."
Dr. Soo Rhee has been selected to receive one of the new Provost Faculty Achievement Awards.
A research article by Matt Keller and collaborators was chosen by the American Journal of Psychiatry's editors as "particularly interesting and important" in the journal's end-of-year editorial. You can also read the full research article.
Dr. Erik Willcutt recently received the APA's Division 53 (Child and Adolescent Clinical Psychology) Early Career Research Award.
If you have an announcement for the general news section, please email agross@colorado.edu