Melanie--what kind of behavior are you studying? Some sort of specific dog behavior? I'd bet a lot of folks here would be interested...
I realized I never answered this.
The project I'm working for is looking at the genetic background of pathological, anxiety-related behaviors in dogs, including stuff like fear aggression, separation anxiety, noise phobia. Dogs have a number of anxiety issues that are probably homologous to human psychiatric disorders and caused by the same stuff (i.e., faulty brain chemistry).
The red Border Collie in all of my photos is my personal behavior case, and the dog who got me interested in the topic -- and who got me the postdoc I currently have. The idea is to come up with better treatment options for owners and dogs who need help, and also to use dogs as a model system for looking at human psychiatric disorders, which they're good for because they are much more similar to us behaviorally than current model systems (i.e., mice and rats).
We are looking at owned dogs, and soliciting information from owners, breeders, and handlers. We don't keep any dogs in-house. The kind of info we need is behavioral info (questionnaires, videos, etc.) and DNA (cheek swabs).
Eventually we'd like to look at normal, breed-specific behaviors (in my case, working behaviors in Border Collies). I'm also interested in patterns of canine diversity (both within and between breeds) and dog evolution.
If anyone here has a dog and wants to participate in the behavioral genetics project, just give me a holler. The ideal candidate is a dog with (a) issues and (b) a pedigree, but because we also need a comparative sample, and are interested in overall diversity, all dogs can play. Come one, come all!