On Friday, April 6th, the 7th Annual Alumni Association Conference and Research Day was held. This well-attended all day event was a great success with outstanding pre-clinical and clinical research presentations by trainees in our department, which followed by talks on pain management from Carl W. Christensen, M.D., Ph.D. (DPBN), Suzanne L. Keller, Ph.D., LP (DPBN), Todd E. Liniger, M.D. (Dept. of Anesthesiology) and Jonathan A. Sugar, M.D., PC (Dept. of Psychiatry, U. of Michigan). A total of 36 pre-clinical and clinical research abstracts were presented; 6 as oral presentations and 30 as posters, which strongly demonstrates how active and competitive the research is in our department.

During the event, the following awards were given:

• The 2012 Fischhoff Distinguished Faculty Award was given to Margaret Davis Scales posthumous.
• The 2012 Dean Asselin Award was given to Erik C. Brown - Title of paper “Evaluation Reverse Speech as a Control Task with Language-Related Gamma Activity on Electrocorticography”. Erik is currently a MD/PhD student in the Translational Neuroscience graduate program and his advisor is Eishi Asano, M.D., Ph.D. (Dept. of Neurology).

The recipients of the best research presentation award were:

• Pre-clinical presentation award winner: Danielle Senador. The title of the presentation was “A Novel Rat Model of ADHD Associated with Isolated Epileptiform Discharges” and the co-authors were D. T. Barkmeier, S. Perrine, N. Boutros and J. A. Loeb. Dr. Senador is currently a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow being mentored by Dr. Jeffrey A. Loeb.
• Clinical presentation award winner: Amy. M. Loree. The title of the presentation was “Sex differences in the purchasing and use patterns of heroin and cocaine” and the co-authors were M. K. Greenwald, C. L. Steinmiller and L. H. Lundahl. Ms. Loree is currently a 4th year doctoral student in clinical psychology being mentored currently and previously by Dr. Steven Ondersma, Dr. Mark Greenwald, Leslie Lundahl, and Caren Steinmiller. The study was conducted in the Human Pharmacology Laboratory.