Kyle E. Parker

The paper introduces a wireless wearable device for intravenous drug delivery in freely moving rats, showing it does not disrupt behavior and enables reliable drug administration.

This study shows that aging reduces motivation in mice by decreasing Bdnf expression in the ventral tegmental area, and that this effect can be replicated by Bdnf knockdown in young mice.

The paper identifies a novel monosynaptic glutamatergic projection from the ventral tegmental area to the locus coeruleus that enhances aversive processing through synaptic integration during salient stimuli.

This study identifies mu opioid receptors in the locus coeruleus as critical regulators of pain, showing they gate the LC's role as a pain generator through bidirectional modulation of hyperalgesia.

The paper introduces a new behavioral task, the punishment risk task, to study anxiogenic behaviors in mice and shows that anxiolytic drugs reduce response latency to reward cues under punishment risk.

This paper introduces parapinopsin (PPO), a photoswitchable GPCR-based opsin that enables rapid and reversible presynaptic inhibition, and demonstrates its utility in vivo.