Melody Rivera-Hernández, a PhD candidate in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Physiology, has been awarded the Ruth L. Kirschstein Predoctoral National Research Service Award (F31) by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Rivera-Hernández's project combines computational neurogenetics with functional genomics in neurons to investigate opioid use disorder (OUD) risk, an area of research with urgent public health relevance given the toll opioid addiction continues to take on individuals across the United States.
Co-mentored by Janitza Montalvo-Ortiz, PhD, and Kristen Brennand, PhD, Rivera-Hernández's work focuses on understanding how genetic variants linked to opioid use disorder functionally alter brain biology and contribute to disease risk. The project draws on the complementary strengths of both mentors' labs: Montalvo-Ortiz's group specializes in genomic and epigenomic profiling of OUD in human postmortem brain tissue, while Brennand, the Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor of Psychiatry, pioneered the use of patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) models to study psychiatric disease. Together, the two approaches let Rivera-Hernández trace genetic associations from population-level data down to functional effects in neurons.
Rivera-Hernández, who is from Vega Alta, Puerto Rico, and is a first-generation college student, attended Northeastern University on a Torch Scholarship, graduating with a B.S. in biochemistry. At Yale, she has twice been recognized by the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation and is a Medical Research Scholar, a program that pairs PhD training with mentored clinical experience to help scientists work more effectively at the interface of research and medicine.
The F31 award, funded through the NIH's National Research Service Award mechanism, supports promising predoctoral students conducting mentored dissertation research, providing both a stipend and other support for the duration of the fellowship.