Undergraduate student Camila Gutierrez was awarded the MU Honors College Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher 2025 Award, in recognition of her valuable research in the LAMP Lab. She was recognized during the annual Honors College Spring Awards Ceremony at the Missouri State Historical Society on April 15, 2025. Congratulations, Camila!

Looking forward to 48th Annual Research Society on Alcohol (RSA) Scientific Meeting/ISBRA Congress, June 21-25, 2025 in New Orleans, LA, USA. Lab members Devon Terry & Camila Gutierrez will each be presenting a poster and sharing initial findings from the Sips and Shapes study (the OG!). RSA is a prestigious national scientific organization dedicated to advancing research on alcohol use and alcohol-related problems. We are proud of and thrilled for our mentees, Devon Terry and Camila Gutierrez, as being selected to present at RSA is a significant achievement, and a great opportunity to network, learn from others, and be part of important discussions shaping the future of alcohol research!

Exploration of Behavioral and Neural Responses to Visual Cues Experimentally Paired with Intra-Oral Alcohol Receipt in the Human Laboratory.
Devon Terry, Sandie Keerstock, Roberto Cofresi.

Reduced Sleep Hours and Increased Alcohol Cravings in Young Adults.
Maria Camila Gutierrez, Sandie Keerstock, Roberto Cofresi.

The Sips and Shapes study will also be discussed in a Symposia chaired by Dr. Roberto Cofresi “Alcohol’s Incentive Salience: Cue Reactivity & Associative Memory Studies Across Species”. The Symposia will bring together scientists and scholars working on affective and motivational features of alcohol memories, spanning human and non-human animal models, in order to foster crosstalk on the neural mechanisms of alcohol’s incentive salience.

We’re excited to contribute to this important conversation and look forward to engaging discussions at RSA/ISBRA 2025! Stay tuned for more updates.

Cofresí, R.U., Piasecki, T.M. & Bartholow, B.D. (in press). Inhibitory control in the sober state as a function of alcohol sensitivity: A pilot functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience-Brain Health and Clinical Neuroscience, 19. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2025.1557661
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Cofresí, R.U., Piasecki, T.M. & Bartholow, B.D. (2025). Alcohol insensitivity and the incentive salience of alcohol: Two decades of work relevant to future directions of the addictions neuroclinical assessment. Translational Psychiatry, 15, 50. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41398-025-03273-y
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Are you graduating in May or August and looking for a paid research position after graduation?

We are seeking a motivated, organized, and driven research coordinator to conduct a series of federally-funded EEG and fMRI studies examining the role of conditioned cue reactivity and incentive salience in eating, drinking, and drug use with a focus on alcohol use.

Apply here - External candidates

Apply here - Internal candidates

Our new study is launching this semester! Interested individuals may read more information at the study’s informational page on our lab website:

Sips and Shapes 2

We are thrilled to welcome Devon Terry, B.A., Research Specialist I, as the newest member of our lab!

Devon is the Research Coordinator for Sips and Shapes (R00AA029169 PI: Cofresí). She holds dual B.A. degrees in Psychology and Anthropology from the University of Missouri, graduating Magna Cum Laude.

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After successful completion of the K99 phase of his NIH Pathway to Independence Award, Dr. Cofresí received the R00 phase of the award to continue research on the Pavlovian conditioning model of individual differences in risk for alcohol cue incentive salience sensitization.NIH/NIAAA K99/R00-AA029169 PI Cofresí

The R00 phase will take place at the University of Missouri, and involve 4 research studies in the family of the Sips and Shapes Study. Be on the lookout for recruitment of research participants in the coming months!

This exciting news also means that the research team in our lab will grow as we onboard a research coordinator for the R00 studies.

Update: we’re happy to announce that the position has been filled. The application links have been removed. Thank you!

Dr. Sandie Keerstock has over eight years of research experience, including a PhD in experimental psycho-linguistics, and three years of focused work collecting human EEG for alcohol use-related studies as research coordinator for Dr. Bruce Bartholow’s Social Cognitive and Addiction Neuroscience Lab. She also has experience managing post-award funding for MU Arts & Science. She is joining the LAMP Lab as full time research scientist and co-director. Her role will be to manage and implement a growing number of scientific projects as well as supervise staff in the lab. She will also update the lab website from now on!

Assistant Professor

Dr. Cofresí was recruited as part of the MizzouForward Faculty Initiative as Assistant Professor starting Fall 2024.
His Tenure-Track appointment is in the Department of Psychological Sciences, where he did his postdoctoral training. He will be affiliated with the Cognition & Neuroscience (C&N) area, and is interested in collaborating and/or co-mentoring those affiliated with other training areas, including the Clinical Psychology area.

As a former NIH/NIAAA T32 trainee himself, Dr. Cofresí will be involved with the Alcohol and Addiction Institutional Training Program at MU which includes predoctoral and postdoctoral training opportunities (NIH/NIAAA T32) as well as summer research experiences for undergraduates via the MU-ARTSS program (NIH/NIAAA R25). Dr. Cofresí is also affiliated with the Missouri Center for Addiction Research & Engagement (MO-CARE), a multi-disciplinary collaboration among addiction investigators across the University of Missouri System seeking to better understand and prevent addictive behaviors.

Lab expansion

• The lab is growing! Two full-time staff will join the research team to help run the lab and coordinate studies.
• We are anticipating the award of the R00 phase of the NIH/NIAAA K99-R00 award in Fall 2024.
• We will be occupying new spaces in the Melvin H. Marx Building on MU Campus. Come visit us while we renovate, furnish and equip the spaces, and stayed tuned for a Grand Opening Tour of the new lab!
• The lab name as well as lab website URL will change, from cofresilab to MU Learning And Memory Psychophysiology (LAMP) Lab to reflect the expanding team.

Stay tuned for other exciting news!

Undergraduate researchers Camila Gutierrez and Katelyn Matzdorf presented their independent projects in poster form at the 2024 Mizzou Show Me Research Week. Poster judges agreed that Camila and Katelyn did a fantastic job.

Thanks to an invitation from Dr. Ksenija Marinkovic and the Rising Star Lecture Series, Dr. Roberto Cofresí visited San Diego State University to connect with faculty, staff, and students interested in human laboratory-based addiction-related neuroscience. He gave a talk titled “Incentive salience & alcohol sensitivity.”

FACE PROCESSING AND THE EXPRESSION OF RACE BIAS: EFFECTS OF BETWEEN-AND WITHIN-PERSON VARIABILITY IN MOTIVATION TO ENGAGE CONTROL - Paul Brancaleone, Roberto Cofresi, Hannah Volpert-Esmond, David Amodio, Tiffany Ito, Bruce Bartholow

P3 EVENT-RELATED POTENTIAL RESPONSE TO ALCOHOL CUES FORECASTS REAL-WORLD ALCOHOL USE BEHAVIOR BY EMERGING ADULT DRINKERS - Roberto Cofresi, Casey Kohen, Thomas Piasecki, Bruce Bartholow

Roberto Cofresí - Top-Down Inhibitory Control Over Bottom-Up Behavioral Approach Impulses Triggered by Alcohol

This talk was presented at the APA Division 06 - Society for Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology.

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Roberto attended the 46th Annual RSA Scientific Meeting held in Bellevue, Washington in late June 2023. He attended very thought-provoking symposia on the neural bases of chronic alcohol use-related cognitive-behavioral inflexibility, novel approaches to understanding alcohol withdrawal, novel approaches to studying functional brain connectivity, and new theoretical perspectives on recovery from alcohol use disorder. As always, it was a pleasure meeting new researchers, and reuniting with colleagues from other universities, including friends and mentors at the University of Texas (Drs. Hongjoo Lee, Regina Mangieri, and Rueben Gonzales) and Indiana University (Drs. David Kareken and Ann Kosobud).

Congratulations to lab members who graduated this semester!

(1) Darius Stewart was accepted into the MU Masters in Public Health in the Fall. He will continue collecting data for the lab!

(2) Ian Flowers was accepted into the graduate program in Applied Psychology at Maastricht University, Netherlands.

(3) Liam Peck will be working as Research Specialist I at MU Psychological Sciences coordinating a NIH R01 Study.

(4) Alana Hatanaka will be working as Hospital Administrator in Columbia, MO.

Thank you all for the opportunity to mentor you and looking forward to seeing where your post-graduation journey will take you!

Undergraduate lab members mentored by Dr. Cofresi presented their independent research projects at the 2023 edition of the Undergraduate Research Week.

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The lab attended the 2022 annual meeting of the Society For Psychophysiological Research (SPR), which took place Sept 28-Oct 2 in Vancouver, BC, Canada

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Various Pavlovian conditioning protocols involving rapid intra-oral liquid delivery and EEG recording were piloted, one of which became the K99 study protocol.

Dr. Cofresí visited the laboratory of Dr. David Kareken (K99/R00 advisory committee member) at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, Indiana. During his visit, he presented his research agenda to the faculty of the Indiana Alcohol Research Center, a group of pre-clinical non-human animal and clinical human subjects researchers.

Dr. Cofresí presented at the 2022 annual convention of the American Psychological Association (APA), which took place Aug 4-6 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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Postdoctoral Fellow for 4 years in Dr. Bruce Bartholow’s SCANlab, Dr. Cofresi received a prestigious NIH-NIAAA K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Career Award and was promoted to Research Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri.

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The article features experts on the science of addiction, MU Professor Dr. Kenneth Sher and Dr. Roberto Cofresi, who weigh in on how HBO’s ‘Euphoria’ depicts addiction.

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Dr. Roberto Cofresi shared with The New Yorker Magazine his insights about neurobiology of conditioned behaviors like alcohol and drug abuse. Click here for the full The New Yorker article

Kristin Black wrote a piece about Roberto Cofresí for the Missouri Center for Addiction Research and Engagement (MO-CARE). The article talks about Roberto’s experience with MO-CARE, and how the integrated approach of MO-CARE was an opportunity for him to combine his expertise in pre-clinical models, basic science research and human psychology to pursue interdisciplinary answers to the puzzle of addiction.

Click here to read the full article