Vivek gives a seminar at Scripps Florida

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.  ...

Presentations at the Complex Trait Community 2023 Conference

Gautam, Brian, Jaycee, and Vivek gave oral presentations of their work at this year's CTC meeting in a session called "Machine learning for rodent behavior". https://complextrait.org/meetings/ctc-rg2023/program.html Talk Titles: A machine-vision-based frailty index...

Lab Stroll for blueberries and reptiles

Brian led the lab in search of blueberries and found a snake. It's a smooth green snake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smooth_green_snake Everyone got to pose with the non-venomous snake. [gallery...

2023 Pirate Golf and BBQ

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.

Jaycee passes her qualifying exam

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)...

Tom celebrates 25 years at JAX

Tom Sproule celebrated 25 years at JAX. Tom has been in the Kumar Lab since 2017 as an RA III. Congratulations Tom on this great accomplishment and the leadership you have shown in the lab. The milk cake was made by Marina (recipe to follow...maybe). It was...

Lab Hike #5

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

Yan Dong Visit and Lab Hike #4

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 gives a seminar at University of Texas-Houston

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...

ML-Behavior Workshop

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 presents lab research at UTHSC

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.

Kumar Lab Receives a 2021 SFARI Director’s Award

Press announcement here - the work will fund monitoring of ASD models using our long-term methods. We appreciate the support from SFARI (Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative) which is one of the most innovative funding agencies for biomedical research....

Two new Kumar Lab members join

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

Summary of our nociception work

A nice summary of our nociception paper by Janine. https://www.mousephenotype.org/news/jax-researchers-develop-new-automated-system-for-recording-pain-behaviour-in-mice/...

Sleep paper is now published online

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):...

Gait Paper is accepted to Cell Reports

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...

Sleep Paper is accepted

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

Updated paper: Gait analysis

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...

Grooming paper is published in eLife

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:...

Kumar Lab receives a new grant from NIDA

The Kumar Lab received a grant from NIDA to build new models of addiction. The press release is here https://www.jax.org/news-and-insights/2020/july/building-better-mouse-models-for-addiction-research The project summary is available here: PROJECT SUMMARY Addiction...

Kumar Lab hosts Dr. Eric Yttri for a virtual visit

Dr. Yttri, from Carnegie Mellon University, Department of Biological Sciences, presented his lab's latest work from this paper. The paper uses unsupervised learning to understand the types of behaviors mice carry out. Dr. Yttri met with postdocs, engineers, and...

Circadian and Sleep Research Support by NIH

I was part of a special emphasis study section last week titled - "Circadian Patterns of Gene Expression Associated with Disease" for RFA-HL-20-016. The RFA was sponsored by NHLBI and NIDA, so most of the proposals revolved around priorities of these two ICs. ...

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Vivek attends the 2020 NIDA genetics consortium meeting

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 gives lecture at Dartmouth

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 Speaks at the Causeway Club on MDI

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 presents at the 2019 Complex Trait Consortium Meeting

Vivek attended and presented at the CTC meeting in UCSD. The CTC meeting is an annual meeting of complex trait geneticists who use model organisms. Vivek spoke on the use of computer vision to extract heritable ethological endophenotypes from mice.  The meeting has...

Vivek speaks at MDIBL on an opioid crisis panel

MDIBL hosted a meeting of researchers on the opioid crisis in Maine. The panel is part of the 46th Maine Biological and Medical Sciences Symposium (MBMSS), an annual statewide gathering at which students and scientists have the opportunity to network, collaborate,...

Vivek gives a talk at the Discovery Museum in Bridgeport, CT

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 tracking paper published

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 speaks at the 2019 Maine State Science Fair

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...

Vivek gives Maine Engineering Expo Keynote Address

Vivek presents the keynote address at the Maine Engineering Expo. Approximately 150 people attended the banquet. National Engineers Week was initiated to publicly promote the work and contributions of our nation's engineers. During this week, engineering...

Brian’s video compression tests

Visual examples of some of the compression tests. Original sub-panel of video and differences between original and compressed frames. Difference previews are amplified 2x to enhance visibility. Video Acquisition Imaging Hardware All data was acquired using the same...

JAXMice Mouse Models

Lab Lunch May 2017 to celebrate Graduation.

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...