Graduate Student, Atkinson Lab

Annie Park is a doctoral candidate in the Institute for Neuroscience and researches alcohol behaviors in fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster).  She researches the basis of sexually dimorphic alcohol behaviors in flies, with special interest in a gene known as fruitless-Male, or fruM, and its involvement in alcohol behaviors.  FruM is a transcription factor that is known to regulate sex-specific fly behaviors, as well as the development of male and female neural circuits.

Previously, Annie developed an ethanol preference paradigm known as BARCODE that uses non-endogenous oligonucleotides to demarcate patches of fly food.  During food comsumption, fly feeding history can be measured using qPCR of the oligonucleotides to determine food preference.  Using BARCODE, Annie found that FruM regulates alcohol preference in male flies.  Currently, she is working to understand how low doses of alcohol produce aggression in males and receptivity to courtship in females. 

Annie is a recipient of the H. L. Bruce/F. M. Jones Graduate Fellowship in Addiction Biology and was selected to give a talk for TEDxUTAustin 2018.  She graduated from the University of Maryland with a bachelor's degree in Neuroscience and a minor in Physics.