One of the perks of being in Bar Harbor - lab folks provide free eggs (Olivia from Rosenthal lab in this case)!

Vivek attended and presented at the 2025 AGE meeting in Anchorage, Alaska. Vivek was part of the Shock Center Director's Symposium. He presented on Gautam's frailty index work.  ...

Tom Sproule (RAIII) has completed his 30th year at JAX! We celebrated with a lab made cakes.  

Vivek attended the ODIN symposium, sponsored by The Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The 2025 Open Data in Neurophysiology (ODIN) Symposium group seeks to fill the pressing need to bridge scales and modalities in...

The talk was at the University of Maine, Orono hosted by Drs. Ben King and Joel Graber. Several members of the lab attended the lecture.

On April 2, 2025 Allentown and JAX installed the first Discovery Rack in the Kumar Lab. The lab has been working together with a large team on its development over the past 2+years. The system is based on the work that the Kumar Lab has done over the past 8 years....

Vivek attended the annual SFARI meeting hosted by the Simons Foundation in NYC. He presented a poster and had awesome pizza!...

The week of March 31, 2025 was eventful in the lab. We had 4 new members start officially in the lab. Keith Sheppard and Glen Beane started as Principal Software Engineers. Tuan Nguyen started as a Tufts Neuroscience Graduate Student. Tim Leach started as a RAII....

Enough said! See here for more info!        

Vivek was invited to present at the Synaptic Dysfunction in Neurodevelopmental Disorders symposium. It was part of the NWU Conte Center and a satellite meeting to SfN 2024....

Fall 2024 is here! This is one our my favorite trees in Bar Harbor. It's on Ledgelawn on way to JAX.    

Congratulations to Yehya on getting this award. They proposed to continue to study the Crichton mouse model of age dependent changes in behavior. The Out to Innovate™ Scholarships, established in 2011, are intended for LGBTQ+ undergraduate and graduate students...

Both Cayson and Lucia finished their 10 week program. Their presentations were fantastic. We wish them luck as they return to college for the fall semester. Here are some photos. [gallery columns="4"...

Last week Dr. Jake Beierle, our post-doctoral fellow, traveled to Montebello Quebec to attend the prestigious North American Pain School (NAPS). At the weeklong event, Jake shared his work assessing migraine models using the Kumar Lab’s machine learning empowered...

The two summer students from the Kumar lab were able to go with the rest of the summer student program (including from the Connecticut campus) to a weekend retreat at Camp Medomak in Washington, Maine! The weekend was spent swimming by the lake, playing various...

Jaycee and Vivek published a commentary entitled, A new era in quantification of animal social behaviors, in the Journal of Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. Link to article: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38160721/

Vivek was invited to give a talk at The Herbert Wertheim UF Scripps Institute for Biomedical Innovation & Technology in February. Thank you for the invitation. I learned an incredible amount from my interactions with the faculty at Scripps Florida.  ...

Year 3 of the R13 course was a success! Thank you to all who attended. https://www.jax.org/education-and-learning/education-calendar/2023/10-October/impacts-of-sleep-and-circadian-biology-on-alzheimers-disease-and-aging 2023_CC_Impacts of Sleep flyer v4...

The second year of the course was a success. We had 20+ instructors and ~35 students attend the course from all over the world! Lots of good science and hiking. JC, Jake, and Anshul attended the course from the Kumar Lab. JC was also a TA with Brian....

Hike up Champlain  

The lab celebrated the summer with our annual pirate golf and BBQ. It was also Sandeep's last day in the lab. This is the 6th (or 7th) year of Pirate Golf.

A smaller group hiked around Eagle Lake on Friday.  

Jaycee and Vivek attended the Tufts Genetics Retreat in Freeport, Maine. Jaycee presented a poster and got second place. Great job Jaycee!  

Jaycee, who is part of the Tufts Genetics Program, passed her qualifying exam with flying colors. Nice job Jaycee, you are now an official PhD Candidate. We thank her committee (Dr. Beth Dumont, Greg Carter, Donna Slonim, and program representative Dr. Chris Baker)...

Beehive is one of the more exciting trails at Acadia.      

The NIDA Genetics meeting was held on the main campus (Natcher Center). It was our first in person meeting in a couple of years. Jake presented a poster on the pain work. It was good to see many colleagues. ...

Beech Mountain has an abandoned fire tower!    

We hiked with the lab visitor, Stef Puig. Brian led the hike around Long Pond....

Dr. Puig visited the lab for a collaboration on chronic pain models. She will be collaborating with Jake in the lab to use computer vision for pain assays. Dr. Puig gave Friday's Genetic Interest Group seminar.

Dr. Yan Dong was Vivek's Thursday seminar guest. Dr. Dong visited from the University of Pittsburgh. He gave an excellent seminar on the neurobiology of addiction.   We hiked Gorham Mountain. ...

Vivek visited and gave a seminar in the Univeristy of Texas-Houston Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Dr. Seung Hee Yoo hosted Vivek. It was a fun visit to a great department. Houston was heavily affected by Hurricane Harvey. Here is a flood gate...

'The second year of the course was held at JAX on Oct 17-20 and brought together speakers and students ~40. [gallery columns="4"...

Vivek co-organized THE SHORT COURSE ON THE APPLICATION OF MACHINE LEARNING FOR AUTOMATED QUANTIFICATION OF BEHAVIOR at High Seas on Oct. 2022. Brian and Leinani ran a workshop and attended the course. [gallery columns="4"...

Vivek was invited by the graduate students of the UTHSC Neuroscience Program. He met with several colleagues and met new students. His talk focused on the use of computer vision for preclinical models of psychiatric disease.

Tufts students in the Genetics and Neuroscience programs joined together on April 11 - April 13 in the annual effort to facilitate community between the Boston-based and Bar Harbor-based students. The three-day retreat featured student-talk sessions, student-poster...

Michelle Berger and Marina Santos have joined the Kumar Lab as Research Associates. More to come on their background and roles in the lab. WELCOME MARINA AND MICHELLE

The article can be found here. Standard link (you may share this link anywhere): https://academic.oup.com/sleep/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/sleep/zsab260/6414386 Free-access link (see below for how you may use this link):...

The mouse gait paper has been accepted. A preprint is here - the final version will be shorter due to space limitations from the Journal. Congratulations to Keith and Gautam on leading this effort.  The work was started by Justin Gardin, a stellar postdoc in the...

Leinani's and Gautam's paper is online as a preprint. It is currently under review at Nature Aging.

Visual determination of sleep states is accepted in the journal Sleep. Congratulations to Brian and Mandy for leading this effort.

We received two new grants. The press release is here. We are looking for additional lab members. https://www.jax.org/news-and-insights/2021/september/untangling-the-biology-of-addiction  

An updated version of Gait analysis paper is on Biorxiv. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.29.424780v2 It has new analysis from Keith Sheppard and Gautam Sabnis including several new figures in the supplement. We look forward to getting reviews...

Paper link is here https://elifesciences.org/articles/63207 Data associated with the paper is here with video data uploaded to Zenodo https://zenodo.org/record/4646088 We also share some videos of our network in action:...

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.08.331017v1

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.08.331017v1  

Vivek and Arojit attended the NIDA genetics meeting in Bethesda, MD. They presented two posters. Vivek presented our work on cloning of a mutation that regulates cocaine responses. This is a new gene that has not been linked to cocaine responses.  Abstract from the...

Vivek was invited to give a seminar at Dartmouth University by Dr. Gio Bosco and his postdoctoral fellow Shiva Sathyanarayana. Vivek spoke about the lab's work on Cyfip2 (work of postdoctoral Arojit Mitra, Kyungin Kim, and others). He also spoke about the lab's...

Vivek gave a lecture on the genetics of addiction at the Causeway Club on behalf of Acadia Family Center. The talk was attended by approximately 50 people. Dr. Dick Dimond also gave a talk preceding Vivek's talk.

Vivek gave a talk on the genetics and neuroscience of addiction at the Discovery Museum in Bridgeport, CT. The talk was attended by several dozen museum attendees and organized by JAX government outreach folks. Vivek also met with Connecticut State Representative,...

Brian's paper on robust mouse tracking is published. This paper describes how to track mice in complicated environments. Sean and others contributed to this paper. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-019-0362-1 Data from the paper is here. [button...

Vivek spoke about addiction genetics and neuroscience to high schools students from across the state of Maine. Over 200 students competed in over a dozen categories in this year's science fair.  More information about the event is here. Arojit Mitra was...

The lab celebrated the end of the school year with a lunch at Side Street Cafe. Congratulations to Kai, who is off to Stanford in the fall. Congratulations to Alden, who is off to University of Massachusetts, Amherst in the fall. A big thanks to Megan McOsker from...