Dr. Nihal Salem, postdoc in Dayne Mayfield’s lab, received a F99/K00 NIH Blueprint D-Span Award as well as a SfN Trainee Professional Development award.

The F99/KI00 NIH Blueprint Diversity Specialized Predoctoral to Postdoctoral Advancement in Neuroscience (D-SPAN) Award is to support a defined pathway across career stages for outstanding trainees who are from diverse backgrounds.  Nihal won this award for her proposal to research brain mechanisms mediating the escalation of drinking in alcohol use disorder and to utilize drug repurposing to target those mechanisms.  

The Trainee Professional Development Award (TPDA) recognizes undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who demonstrate scientific merit and excellence in research.  The aim of these awards is to promote the advancement of career training to neuroscientists.  TPDA recipients receive support to attend the 2021 SfN meeting and present their research. Nihal’s research utilizes state-of-the-art single cell and spatial transcriptomics to identify alcohol-sensitive molecular mechanisms that have a high level syntenic conservation between human and mouse and then determine the impact of genetic manipulation on voluntary alcohol consumption in mice.  TPDA recipients also receive access to professional development and leadership opportunities sponsored by SfN.