Welcome
We are a group of geneticists, neuroscientists, and computer scientists who are passionate about discoveries of novel targets and models for mental illness through innovation at the confluence of computational, genetic, and genomic methods.
The Kumar Laboratory is located at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. We study neural circuits in the brain whose misregulation leads to behavioral abnormalities including addiction, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and depression. Using mouse molecular genetics as a foundation, and a combination of computational, biochemistry, physiology, and imaging techniques, we dissect these complex conditions in mammals.
Primarily, we use functional genomic approaches in mice to identify genes and pathways that regulate these behaviors. We seek to develop better models of human diseases that can be used by the biomedical research community for therapeutics. Recently, we have applied machine learning and artificial intelligence methods to understand animal behavior at high spatial and temporal resolution, objectively, and over long periods of time. Our work has been published in numerous high impact journals such as Science, eLife, Nature Communications Biology, among others.
Latest Lab News and Blogs:
Singularity Container Efficiency Benchmark
Singularity is a relatively new tool that extends docker-style containerized compute into the hands of researchers on compute clusters. For security reasons, most compute clusters did not allow docker containers, and would require any software to be installed by...
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 talks about addiction on WVOM radio in Bangor
Vivek was on the Ric Tyler and George Hale show https://www.wvomfm.com/episode/ghrt-rewind-07-17-kumar-jax-lab-addiction-research-1100/
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...
Some useful links