Staglin Music Festival/NARSAD Rising Star Awardee, 2009
Dr. Hongjun Song
Hongjun Song, Ph.D. of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine is a 2009 Rising Star Award winner! Dr. Song, as head of a cellular neuroscience lab at Johns Hopkins, has developed many novel techniques for engineering and studying the development of neurons. Dr. Song's grant proposal will use some of these techniques to learn more about the growth of nerve cells which incorporate schizophrenia and bipolar risk in their genes, and compare this development with that of genetically "healthy" cells. But in contrast with earlier similar studies using mice, Dr. Song's project will study human nerve cells, growing in mouse brains and in culture.
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Dr. Francis Lee
Staglin Music Festival/NARSAD Rising Star Awardee, 2009
Francis Lee, M.D., Ph.D., of Weill Cornell Medical College, is a Rising Star winner for 2009! Dr. Lee is director of a laboratory whose main area of research is in basic molecular, neural mechanisms that are relevant to neuropsychiatric disorders. His proposal aims to shed new light on the genetic and biochemical causes of anxiety disorders, and to test for new medications to treat them.
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Staglin Music Festival/NARSAD Rising Star Awardee, 2009
Dr. Andrew Pieper
Andrew Pieper, M.D., Ph.D. of University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center is a Rising Star award winner for 2009! Dr. Pieper has studied extensively the relationships among the genetics and neurology of schizophrenia and is head of a lab investigating the relationship of neurogenesis to mental illness. His grant proposal, titled In vivo identification of new pharmacologic agents to improve hippocampal functioning in schizophrenia, represents a significant step forward in the discovery of more effective schizophrenia treatments.
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Staglin Music Festival/NARSAD Rising Star Awardee, 2008
Dr. Schahram Akbarian
With the research of Dr. Schahram Akbarian in 2008-9, our understanding of how schizophrenia risk genes express themselves has taken an interesting step deeper. Dr. Akbarian, of University of Massachusetts Medical School, received IMHRO’s Rising Star Award in 2008 for his proposal in epigenetics, the science of how the activity of genes changes over time. His study, titled "The 'chromatin landscape' of prefrontal neurons: Developmental regulation and potential alterations in schizophrenia," has produced this insight: although it's been known for years that the way certain genes activate can regulate brain function, Dr. Akbarian has just found that the "histone tags" that govern this activation have a complex structure of their own.
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Staglin Music Festival/NARSAD Rising Star Awardee, 2007
Dr. Akira Sawa
Dr. Akira Sawa directs the Molecular Psychiatry Program at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he pioneers ways to understand and treat deficiencies in the DISC1 schizophrenia risk gene. In 2008-9, the laboratory of Dr. Akira Sawa has made stunning progress in three key areas: Understanding the mechanisms by which the DISC1 gene acts, developing a new way to remedy DISC1 deficiency, and finding schizophrenia biomarkers to use as targets for future treatment development.
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Dr. Tyrone Cannon
Staglin Family Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry, UCLA
If teens who are at risk for developing psychosis can be identified and treated before the onset of a full-blown illness, they have a chance to bypass years of disability. At two IMHRO-funded UCLA facilities, the Center for the Assessment and Prevention of Prodromal States (“CAPPS”), and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience ("the CCN"), Tyrone Cannon Ph.D. is leading teams of scientists to develop psychosis prevention as a regular clinical technique. In the last year, the centers have continued to make significant strides toward using neuroimaging to predict whether an ultra-high-risk teen will convert to psychosis within a 15-month time span. It actually looks as though, with continued funding, CAPPS and the CCN will in a few years be able to consistently find, and proactively treat, people biologically fated for psychosis before their first episode–and offer them a much healthier outcome.
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Staglin Music Festival Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, UCSF
Dr. Lauren Weiss
"Autism is one of the most highly heritable and complex disorders known, but a genetic cause or risk factor can be identified in only about 10% of autism cases," says Lauren Weiss, Ph.D., IMHRO-sponsored Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at UCSF. "However, this year, genome-wide association studies have begun to identify common genetic variants associated with autism." Dr. Weiss is a dynamo in autism research at the genetic and molecular level. In the last year she has not only initiated the Bay Area Autism Consortium for research collaboration, but made discoveries and opened directions for future work.
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Staglin Music Festival Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, UCSF
Dr. Susan Voglmaier
Right now you are reading an article on a computer screen. The patterns of the letters are flowing from your eyes to your brain, their shapes being processed by the thalamus and their meanings by the hippocampus, and a combination of information from these two centers is flowing to your pre-frontal cortex so that—voila! You know and understand what you have read. If you have a thought disorder, however, this process may be jumbled. Current theory has it that the thought disorder inherent in schizophrenia may be due to an imbalance in the signal transmission between these three parts of the brain, and IMHRO-sponsored Assistant Professor Susan Voglmaier, M.D., Ph.D. of UCSF is working on a study that may help to decode why and how to treat it.
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