During IBG's recent program review, the Internal Review Committee reported that IBG is "...among the strongest of the research institutes on campus. The Institute has an outstanding faculty and research staff that has established unique and highly successful interdisciplinary research programs." The research record of "...the resident faculty members...is outstanding in terms of international recognition, publications and extramural funding." The Extramural Review Committee concurred, referring to IBG as "...the leading center for human and animal behavioral genetic studies in the US and, arguably, in the world." In its summary findings, the Program Review Panel stated that the "...Institute for Behavioral Genetics is an independent academic enterprise that is peerless in its field and a superb asset to the University of Colorado and to the Boulder Campus."

The mission of IBG, an organized research unit of the University of Colorado at Boulder, is to conduct and facilitate research on the genetic bases of individual differences in behavior and to conduct research training in this interdisciplinary area. Throughout its history, IBG has been characterized by the breadth of its interdisciplinary research and training programs. Although the methodology of behavioral genetics is generally applicable to the study of individual differences for any character, current research at IBG is focused on behaviors of obvious societal relevance.

The human research, in addition to studies of drug-related behaviors, includes large-scale family, twin, and adoption studies of cognitive abilities and personality, and of disorders such as learning disabilities and psychopathology. The detection, localization and identification of individual quantitative trait loci, using both linkage and association methods, is a high priority.

Laboratory animals are used to study drug-related behaviors, particularly those associated with the use of alcohol and nicotine. For these studies, a large number of different strains and genetically selected stocks of mice are maintained in the IBG specific-pathogen-free mouse laboratory. These include inbred and recombinant strains of mice that provide efficient tools for screening behaviors for genetic influence and mapping quantitative trait loci. Selection studies in which mice are bred for certain characteristics provide definitive proof of genetic influence and also yield animal models that are valuable for subsequent research in functional genomics.