The KAUN Lab:
Behavioral Neurogenetics of Addiction 

Postdoctoral associate Dr. Lewis Sherer presented his work at the 9th Northeast Glenn Foundation Symposium on the Biology of Aging held at UConn Health on October 24, 2025. Lewis presented a collaborative project between our lab and the labs of Dr. Tara White and Dr. Carolina Haass-Koffler. This work demonstrates that in humans and flies, the alpha1 receptor is reduced with age. Lewis demonstrated that this reduction plays a causal role in the efficacy of blood-pressure medi

The Kaun Lab is hiring new full-time Research Assistants! The position is ideal for someone interested in investigating how changes in gene regulation impact individual variation in addictive substance use. We are interested in people at all levels of experience but you must have a Bachelor's degree and some experience working in a laboratory. This includes: 1) someone who just graduated with their undergrad degree and is looking for a 2 year research experience ('Grade 7'),

Congratulations to Assistant Professor (Research) Dr. John Hernandez who was just awarded his first grant as a Principal Investigator! This COBRE Center for Nervous System Pilot award provides $100,000 for John to investigate the mechanisms through which stress impacts motivation for alcohol self-administration. The lab is very exciting to see what interesting findings emerge from this new research direction. Well done John!

Karla gave a talk on 'The Functional Consequences of Alternative Splicing on Polysubstance Use', a collaborative project between the Kaun lab and O'Connor-Giles Lab, at the 2025 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Neurobiology of Drosophila meeting October 7-11, 2025. It was fantastic catching up with brilliant friends and learning all the latest in the field.

Investigating pharmacotherapies for alcohol use disorder using Drosophila melanogaster

Karla attended the 2025 National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Genetics and Epigenetics Cross-Cutting Research Meeting at the NIH Campus in Bethesda MD. She gave a talk in a symposium titled "Regulation of Alternative Splicing in Addiction" with Liz Heller, Luana Carvalho and Rohan Palmer and chaired by Amy Lasek. As a reward Karla enjoyed a dinner at a Bethesda Ethiopian restaurant with Adrian Rothenfluh, Tamara Phillips, Dez Coleman, Paul Meyer and Brock Grill.

Every year the last week of August brings everyone together in two graduate program retreats. Our lab tries to attend both retreats as it's always fun to catch up with everyone at the end of the summer. The Neuroscience retreat was held Thursday August 28, and the Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry retreat was held Friday August 29. This year Rebecca represented the lab by presenting her poster "Use of Drosophila melanogaster to identify pharmacotherapies of al

We hosted the inaugural New England Addiction Neuroscience Research Conference at Brown University Friday August 15, 2025. The conference was organized by Dr. Danny Winder from UMass Chan Medical School and Dr. Karla Kaun with assistance from Dr. John Hernandez, Dr. Rebecca Oramas and Dr. Marie Doyle (postdoc in Winder Lab). We had a great turnout with over 100 attendees, and enduring enthusiasm from PIs and trainees alike. John gave a great talk during the Data Blitz that

Karla and Reza taught at the 2025 Drosophila Genetics and Genomics EMBO Practical course in Heidelberg August 4-8. Karla lectured about using Drosophila to perform behavior screens (covering genes and circuits), and Karla and Reza teamed up with Gilles Storelli from University of Heidelberg to teach practical lab exercises on Drosophila feeding and metabolism. Reza taught students how to perform optogenetic experiments to understand how manipulating taste and feeding neuro

The undergraduate students doing research in the lab this summer all presented their work at the Brown Summer Research Symposium on Thursday, July 31. A lot of work went into acquiring, analyzing and visualizing the data in these posters, and all of the students generated a lot of interest and did a fantastic job presenting. Vivian Chan presented ' Physiological and state-dependent mechanisms that regulate co-transmission ' Nicholas Olson presented ' Age variation impacts e

Kaun Lab Annual Retreat at Colt State Harbor, Bristol, RI

Karla, Reza, Aryana and Lewis from the Kaun Lab visited lab alumnus Dr. Kristin Scaplen at her lab at Bryant University on Wednesday, July 10. It was fantastic seeing such a productive undergraduate and technician powered research lab, and fantastic to see all the great behavior assays that the Scaplen Lab is using to understand the circuit basis of alcohol preference.

A warm welcome to Sebastian Martinez Rivera and Legna Rivera, undergraduate students at the University of Puerto Rico who are conducting research in the laboratory through a Dana Foundation Summer Research Internship. Sebastian and Legna are working with Dr. Kaun to help identify how pervasive eugenic principles have impacted how psychiatric diseases like alcohol and substance use disorder are portrayed in the scientific literature and media. Their goal this summer is to help

Congratulations to rising senior Megan Wang, who won a poster award at the Boston Area Drosophila meeting on June 6, 2025. There were a lot of amazing posters at the meeting, and Megan out-competed graduate students and postdocs to win her poster award. Megan will be working full time in the lab this summer through an Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award.

Karla, Lewis, Nandashree, Megan and Nicholas all attended the 2025 Boston Area Drosophila Meeting held at UMass Boston, along with members of the Wharton, Larschan and O'Connor-Giles labs. It was a fantastic meeting, with Rachel Wilson giving the Keynote seminar. A special congratulations to Megan for winning a poster award for her undergraduate work!

Dr. Tariq Brown officially received his PhD and was hooded on Sunday, May 25 at the Brown Commencement ceremony. The Kaun Lab got together for a casual get-together to celebrate Tariq's amazing accomplishments and to wish him well as he moves onto his postdoctoral work with Dr. Toshi Hige at the University of North Carolina. Congrats Tariq!

Kaun Lab members Karla Kaun, Reza Azanchi, John Hernandez and Lewis Sherer joined Kaun lab alumni and collaborators Emily Petruccelli and Kristin Scaplen for the International Behaviour and Neural Genetics annual Genes, Brains & Behavior meeting in Fiji May 19-23 . Karla presented a talk in the ' Mechanisms underlying individual variation in motivated behavior' symposium and John and Lewis gave data blitz talks.

Spring always brings with it the feeling of a new and fresh start. The Lab celebrated Spring this year with a spring cleaning of our bad...

We wish a warm welcome to Ari Bouchie, our newest research assistant! Ari completed her BSc in Biology at Roger Williams University where...

We are lucky to have PhD Candidate Nadine Nowag working with us from February through May, 2025. Nadine joins us from the Universitat...