Dibyadeep Datta, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry, has been selected to receive a 2024 Society of Biological Psychiatry Travel Fellowship Award for the 2024 annual meeting of the Society of Biological Psychiatry (SOBP).
The annual meeting will be held May 9-11, 2024, in Austin, Texas. Datta will receive a stipend to defray meeting expenses.
Selection criteria for the award includes past excellence in scholarly work, potential for scholarly growth in biological psychiatry and clinical neuroscience, and overall excellence.
As a SOBP Travel Award recipient, Datta will be matched with a mentor and will participate in the society’s Early Career Investigator Program throughout the 2024 meeting. He will also present his research titled “Key roles of CACNA1C/Cav1.2 and CALB1/calbindin in prefrontal neurons altered in cognitive disorders.”
The study examines the neurons in layer III of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that are afflicted in cognitive disorders and found that they express an elevated functional calcium interactome, including increased CACNA1C (L-type calcium channel Cav1.2) and CALB1 (calcium-buffering protein calbindin), consistent with excessive calcium driving pathology when calbindin is lost with age/inflammation. The multidisciplinary research project in primates found these neurons require L-type calcium channel actions to sustain firing during working memory, but excessive levels, e.g., driven by stress, weaken firing and induce cognitive impairments.
At Yale School of Medicine, Datta works in the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Unit and Division of Aging and Geriatric Psychiatry.