Helen Kamens
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Neuroscience
More than 100 Americans die each day from opioid overdoses, and few treatments work well for opioid use disorder. Women seem to move from first use to problem use faster than men, yet brain imaging studies of opioid users have mostly included men.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Pharmacology
Psychology
- Topics
opioid use disorder
opioids
morphine
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Aug 2026
What they work on
- Test whether baseline resting-state functional connectivity, measured by rsfMRI in awake male and female C57BL/6J mice, predicts how much morphine each mouse later drinks voluntarily.
- Rescan the same mice after morphine drinking to identify sex differences in how morphine changes brain connectivity.
- Determine whether resting-state connectivity can serve as a biomarker of individual vulnerability to starting opioid use.
More about the research
Most have also scanned people only after long drug use. That leaves open whether some brains are wired in ways that make a person more likely to start using.
Why it matters
Brain connectivity patterns that predict opioid use could serve as biomarkers of vulnerability, helping identify at-risk individuals. Knowing how morphine rewires the brain differently in males and females could guide more targeted, sex-informed treatments for people with opioid use disorder.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Neil Harris
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Neuroscience
Test how acute metabolic depression after TBI changes brain functional connectivity and reorganization over time in rats, using resting-state functional MRI with connectome analysis plus behavioral testing.
Itamar Kahn
Columbia University, NY·Neuroscience
Chart how brain network organization, especially system segregation, changes across the mouse lifespan by repeatedly scanning the same awake mice with resting-state fMRI from 3 to 21 months of age.
Katherine Martucci
Duke University, NC·Neuroscience
Characterize how long-term opioid therapy alters brain response to reward probability, using task-based functional MRI in women with fibromyalgia scanned both while the opioid is active and while it is not.
The school
Pennsylvania State University: 60 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 743 research doctorates a year.
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