John Crabbe, PhD

I have been working at the VA Medical Center and in the Department of Behavioral Neuroscience at the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland since 1979. I entered graduate school at the University of Colorado to obtain a Ph.D. in social psychology. Fortuitously, I was sidetracked into instead studying behavioral neuroscience (AKA biopsychology) at the fledgling Institute for Behavioral Genetics in Boulder. I’ve been pretty much surrounded by mice ever since. I did post-doctoral work at the University of Wisconsin-
Milwaukee and was a Lecturer in Psychology at San José State and then UC-Santa Barbara, and then held a two-year research position at a Dutch pharmaceutical company in the Dutch hinterlands before Portland.

My research interest is in understanding individual differences in behavioral susceptibility to alcohol and other drugs of abuse, and their genetic and neurobiological bases. Most recently, I’ve been breeding mice that voluntarily drink alcohol until they become intoxicated, i.e. developing a mouse model of university students. I’m working with collaborators to figure out how many genes we’ve affected in the process, which ones they are, and what their biological functions are. We’re using that information to try to predict some drugs that are already FDA approved that might be re-purposed to try as treatments for alcoholism.  My expertise is in mouse behavioral tests that try to capture human traits such as anxiety, sensitivity to drug’s rewarding or aversive effects, incoordination, learning and memory, novelty-seeking, and so forth. I am less fluent in rat than in mouse but the languages are related. 

I am familiar with psychiatric genetics/human genetics methods, but not really expert in the more esoteric of them. I am also familiar with the big data/genomics/informatics approaches, but again not really expert there, either.