Paul Meyer, Ph.D.
Undergraduate degree
B.S. (Psychology as a Natural Science) 1996, University of Michigan
Training at OHSU
1999 - 2005
Second Year Project
The effect of MK-801 on ethanol sensitization. (Mentor: Tamara J. Phillips, Ph.D.)
Ph.D. (2005)
Neurochemical substrates of ethanol's locomotor effects. (Mentor: Tamara J. Phillips, Ph.D.)
Current position
Post-doctoral Fellow, Department of Psychology, Washington State University . (Mentor: Michael M. Morgan, Ph.D.)
Email
meyerp@vancouver.wsu.edu
Background & Interests
I've always taken it personally that small molecules such as alcohol and morphine can come to control complex behaviors like drinking and elicit addictive behaviors. I worked as a technician in Harriet de Wit's human behavioral psychopharmacology laboratory at the University of Chicago; where I learned that an individual's response to an abused drug depends a number of factors, ranging from social to biological. I became very interested in the biological and genetic aspects of addiction, but found that many of my questions could not be answered using human subjects. When I asked Dr. de Wit her thoughts, she said “You should go to OHSU for graduate school, they have excellent faculty that is focused on addiction yet will provide you with broad neuroscience training.” So I did that. Through my graduate studies, I became interested in the idea that abused drugs act through some of the same neurochemical pathways, especially those involving the neurotransmitters dopamine and glutamate. My dissertation work with Tamara Phillips involved testing genetically distinct populations of mice for their responses to alcohol, and whether these responses were related to alcohol's effects on glutamatergic and dopaminergic systems. The great thing about the highly interactive nature of the Department of Neuroscience is that its trainees are kept up to date with research in their own and related fields. For example, I learned through courses and seminars that dopamine and glutamate systems play important roles in reinforcement learning, and that drugs of abuse may cause addictive disorders by hijacking these systems, suggesting that drug addiction could be thought of, in some instances, as a dopamine-dependent associative learning disorder . This, to me, is a fascinating idea, and I've dedicated my career to studying the role of dopamine in responding to drug- and motivationally-relevant stimuli. The techniques I've used have been as simple as measuring locomotion in mice and as complex as using patch clamp electrophysiology in brain slices. Currently, I'm studying the role of dopamine in conditioned tolerance to morphine as a post-doctoral fellow at Washington State University . In the future, I'd also like to record from dopamine neurons in animals performing various learning tasks, either as an independent researcher or as a part of a laboratory with similar interests.
Publications
Meyer PJ & Phillips TJ “Behavioral sensitization to ethanol is not associated with cross-sensitization to NMDA and the NMDA antagonists MK-801 and ketamine” Psychopharmacology (submitted).
Meyer PJ, Fossum EN, Ingram SL, & Morgan MM, “DAMGO tolerance, cross-tolerance, and facilitation of morphine tolerance” Neuropharamacology . Epub ahead of print.
Holstein S, Pastor R, Meyer PJ, & Phillips TJ. (2005) Naloxone does not attenuate the locomotor effects of ethanol in FAST, SLOW, or two heterogeneous stocks of mice. Psychopharmacology 182:277-289.
Meyer PJ, Palmer AA, McKinnon C, & Phillips TJ. (2005) “ Behavioral sensitization to ethanol is modulated by environmental conditions, but is not associated with cross-sensitization to allopregnanolone or pentobarbital in DBA/2J mice.” Neuroscience 131:263-273.
Meyer PJ & Phillips TJ. (2003) “ Sensitivity to ketamine, alone or in combination with ethanol, is altered in mice selectively bred for ethanol's locomotor effects” Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research 27:1701-1709.
Meyer PJ & Phillips TJ (2003) “Bivalent effects of MK-801 on ethanol sensitization, but no effect on tolerance to ethanol-induced ataxia.” Behavioral Neuroscience 117: 641-649 .
Cunningham CL, Tull LE, Rindal KE, & Meyer PJ (2002) “Distal and proximal pre-exposure to ethanol in the place conditioning task: tolerance to aversive effect, sensitization to activating effect, but no change in rewarding effect.” Psychopharmacology 160: 414–424.
King AC, & Meyer PJ (2000) "Naltrexone-induced alterations of nicotine response in a cigarette smoking paradigm." Pharmacology, Biochemistry, & Behavior 66: 563-72.
Last updated May 21, 2007