Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Department of Psychiatry
Program in Behavioral Genetics
Demitri Papolos, M.D., Co-Director
Herbert Lachman, M.D., Co-Director
Harvard University Medical School, McLean Hospital
Developmental Biopsychiatry Research Program
Dr. Martin Teicher, M.D., Ph.D., Director
New York Presbyterian Hospital-Cornell Medical Center Westchester Division
Department of Psychiatry
Sleep Studies Center
Laboratory of Human Chonobiology
Patricia Murphy, Ph.D.
New York Presbyterian Hospital-Cornell Medical Center New York City Division
Department of Neurology
Division of Neuropsychology
Steven Mattis, Ph.D.
JBRF Scientific Advisory Council
David Avery
Dr. David Avery is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Washington School of Medicine. After completing a residency at the University of Iowa School of Medicine, he spent two years in research training at Stanford University School of Medicine and two years as a NIMH Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Copenhagen before coming to the University of Washington in 1980.
From 1982-1987 and from 1993 to 2011, he was Director of Inpatient Psychiatry at Harborview Medical Center where he was also Director of the Electroconvulsive Therapy Service. He has world-renowned clinical expertise in the treatment of mood disorders.
He has been an NIMH-funded researcher for nearly all of the last 25 years; his research has involved circadian rhythms and temperature regulation in depression, light therapies of seasonal affective disorder and transcranial magnetic stimulation as a treatment for major depression and fibromyalgia. He is Past President of the West Coast College of Biological Psychiatry, and the author of over 90 peer- reviewed articles and book chapters.
Areas of Expertise:
– Evaluation and management of complex and treatment-refractory mood disorders
– Sleep and circadian rhythm disturbances, including winter depression, and treatment with light therapy and melatonin
– Psychopharmacology of mood disorders
Ross J. Baldessarini
Ross J. Baldessarini, M.D. is an internationally known neuroscientist and research psychopharmacologist who has made many contributions related to the basic scientific understanding of central monoaminergic systems, their involvement in the pathophysiology of neuropsychiatric disorders, and the interactions of antipsychotic and mood-altering agents with them.
His recent interests have been directed particularly toward central dopaminergic systems of the brain and their relevance to the actions, side effects, development, and clinical application of antipsychotic and antimanic agents.
Dr. Baldessarini has been a Career Investigator of the NIMH since 1970, and the author of over 1,350 publications, including the chapters on psychopharmacology in Goodman & Gilman’s standardAmerican Textbook of Pharmacology, as well as his own classic text, Chemotherapy in Psychiatry: Principles and Practice (Harvard University Press), and serves on editorial boards of several leading neuroscience and psychiatric journals. Among his many recognitions was election to the Scholars of Johns Hopkins University.
In 1988, Professor Baldessarini was named permanent Director of the Laboratories for Psychiatric Research as well as Director of the new Bipolar & Psychotic Disorders Program which he founded and, in 1989, also became Co-Director of Psychopharmacology and Psychopharmacology Training at the McLean Psychiatric Division of MGH. He has directed that Program since 1996.
Dr. Baldessarini is a tenured Professor of Psychiatry and in Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School and Senior Consulting Psychiatrist at MGH. He founded the International Consortium for Bipolar Disorder Research in 1995 with colleagues from the US, Canada and Europe, and serves as a consultant to numerous scientific, industrial, and clinical organizations. Ross J. Baldessarini has been very active the education of a generation of medical trainees and psychiatrists in psychopharmacology and other biological aspects of psychiatry, as well as training over 130 basic and clinical researchers. He is widely regarded as having an unusually broad and critical perspective on the integration of basic research in neuroscience and pharmacology with problems in clinical research and contemporary psychiatric practice.
Frederick Goodwin (late)
Frederick K. Goodwin, M.D., is Research Professor of Psychiatry at The George Washington University and Director of the University’s Psychopharmacology Research Center where he conducts research on manic-depressive illness. He also directs the Center on Neuroscience, Medical Progress, and Society at the George Washington University Medical Center. At the Center, Dr. Goodwin’s policy studies focus on the impact of changing patterns of health care on quality and innovation in medicine.
Dr. Goodwin is the former Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the largest research and research training institution in the world dedicated to the application of biological, behavioral, and social science to the treatment and prevention of mental illness and refinement of mental health services. Prior to that, he held a Presidential appointment as head of the Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration.
Dr. Goodwin is a recipient of the major research awards in his field including the Hofheimer Prize from the American Psychiatric Association, the International Anna-Monika Prize for Research in Depression, the Edward A. Strecker Award, the Lieber Prize from NARSAD, the McAlpin Award, the Distinguished Service Award from NAMI, and the Research Award from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. He was the first recipient of the Psychiatrist of the Year from Psychiatric Times, and the Fawcett Humanitarian Award of the NDMDA. In 1998, he was elected President of the Psychiatric Research Society.
The author of 420 publications, Dr. Goodwin (with Kay Redfield Jamison, Ph.D.) wrote Manic-Depressive Illness, the first psychiatric text to win the “Best Medical Book” award from the Association of American Publishers. He is a Member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the ACNP. He serves on the editorial boards of key scientific journals, including the Archives of General Psychiatry, the Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology and is a founder of Psychiatry Research. He is one of five psychiatrists on the Current Contents list of the most frequently cited scientists in the world and one of twelve psychiatrists listed in The Best Doctors in the U.S.
In addition to his work at The George Washington University Medical Center and his private practice, Dr. Goodwin is the host of the award winning The Infinite Mind radio show. This one hour national weekly public radio program is dedicated to issues relating to the mind, the brain, and mental illness. The program is now carried in more than 150 markets. Its estimated 500,000 + listeners make it the most popular health show in public radio.
Manji Husseini
Dr. Husseini K. Manji is Chief of the Laboratory of Molecular Pathophysiology at the National Institute of Mental Health. He is a Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences, and Pharmacology at Wayne State University School of Medicine. At Wayne State, he was the founding director of the Neuropsychiatric Research Unit, and the Founding Director of both the Schizophrenia and Mood Disorders Clinical Research Division at the Laboratory of Molecular Pathophysiology.
Dr. Manji was the 1992 winner of the prestigious A.E. Bennett Award for Psychiatric Research, and went on to win many other important awards, including the Ziskind-Somerfeld Research Award for Neuropsychiatric Research, the NARSAD Prize for Affective Disorders Research (Nola Maddox Falcone Prize) as well as the 2001 and 2002 NIH Special Act Awards.
Husseini Manji has published over 130 professional articles and has done elegant work elucidating the neuroprotective properties of mood stabilizers such as lithium and divalproex sodium. He is the Editor of Neuroscience Perspectives, Biological Psychiatry, and Translational Neuroscience, Psychopharmacology Bulletin. He is an Associate Editor of Bipolar Disorders: An International Journal of Psychiatry and Neurosciences.
Dr. Manji is currently a Member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the NIMH Bipolar Initiative and a Member of the NIMH Bipolar Disorder Systematic Treatment Enhancement Program Oversight Committee .
Husseini Manji’s current work on the molecular and cellular mechanisms of action of mood stabilizing agents is supported by major grants from both the NIMH and the Stanley Foundation.
William Miller
Dr. Miller, a hematologist for 40 years, served on the faculty of the Scripps Clinic and its hospital in La Jolla, California. A founding member of the Scripps Blood and Marrow Transplantation Program, he taught in the residency and subspecialty fellowship program in Hematology and Medical Oncology at Scripps Green Hospital. During this time, Dr. Miller developed an abiding interest in the normal and aberrant functioning of the human immune system before, during, and after hematopoietic cell transplantation. This interest encompassed the effects of inflammation, as modulated through the intrinsic and the adaptive immune system.
Michael Norden
Michael J. Norden, M.D. graduated from Stanford School of Medicine and completed psychiatric residency at Cedars-Sinai/U.C.L.A. He is the author of the best-selling Beyond Prozac (HarperCollins, 1995). Dr. Norden’s work on new indications of SSRIs led off Newsweek’s 1990 cover story of Prozac and resulted in a number of patents.
His collaboration with Dr. Barry Sears exploring psychiatric applications of essential fatty acids, led to Sears’ groundbreaking publication Enter the Zone (HarperCollins, 1995) – one of the first diets to endorse healthy fats and caution against excessive carbohydrates.
Dr. Norden was a charter member of the Society for Light Therapy and Biological Rhythms, served on the auxiliary faculty of the University of Washington for twelve years, and helped launch the first company to market a dawn simulator. Currently, his research focuses on the effects of heat and light on psychopathology and he consults with a venture capital firm on psychiatric applications of artificial intelligence.
Robert Post
Dr. Post graduated from Yale University in 1964, the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1968, and interned at the Einstein School of Medicine in 1969. His psychiatry residency was completed at the Massachusetts General Hospital, NIMH, and George Washington University. He was Chief, Biological Psychiatry Branch for many of his 36 years at the NIMH where his research focused on better understanding and treating patients with refractory unipolar and bipolar illness.
His group has won major awards from the Society of Biological Psychiatry, APA, ACNP, Anna Monika Foundation, NARSAD, NDMDA, NAMI, ACP, ISBD, and the CINP. He is on multiple editorial boards and has published more than 1,070 manuscripts. He is the: author of a book entitled “Treatment of Bipolar Illness: A Casebook for Clinicians and Patients”, 2008: 666 pages, published by WW Norton; and editor of the Bipolar Network News (BNN), a quarterly free newsletter available online at www.bipolarnews.org. He founded the Childhood Mood Disorders Initiative with Robert Findling, MD which allows parents to weekly rate their child’s severity of anxiety, depression, ADHD, oppositional behavior, and mania so these can be printed out and taken to their treating physician for ease of recognition of longitudinal symptom severity and response to treatment.
Robert Shpritzen
Dr. Robert Shprintzen is Professor of Otolaryngology and Communication Sciences at Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York, where he is the Director of of the Center for Diagnosis, Treatment and Study of Velo-Cardio-Facial Syndrome and the Center for Genetic Communication Disorders. He is recognized throughout the medical world for delineating four genetic diseases, several of which bear his name– most notably Velo-Cardio-Facial Syndrome (VCFS), commonly known as Shprintzen’s Syndrome.
Dr. Sprintzen was the first to see that the children with VCFS had a multitude of psychiatric symptoms, including psychosis and paranoia. This observation led to a collaboration with Dr. Demitri Papolos which resulted in the first systematic psychiatric diagnostic study of children with VCFS. The findings from this study, reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry, showed that over 70% of the VCFS children had bipolar spectrum disorders with multiple co-morbidities. Because VCFS arises from a specific genetic abnormality (a microdeletion on the short arm of chromosome 22) Dr. Sprintzen’s work has moved the field of behavioral genetics to actively investigate this region for candidate genes for a number of psychiatric and medical disorders, including bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, as well as certain behavioral traits such as poor modulation of aggression.
Robert Sprintzen is the author of five books, including four texts on genetic disorders associated with communication impairment and feeding disorders. He has been invited to lecture throughout the Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia. He was the keynote speaker at the Mexican National Congress of Human Genetics in 1999, as well as the keynote speaker at a meeting sponsored by the World Health Organization in Zurich, Switzerland in 2000.
Prior to Dr. Sprintzen’s appointment at Upstate, he served as the Director of the Center for Craniofacial Disorders at Montefiore Medical Center and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, where he was Professor of Plastic Surgery and Professor of Otolaryngology. In 1995, he helped found the Velo-Cardio-Facial Syndrome Educational Foundation, Inc. and has served as its Executive Director since its inception.
