Fourteen Yale affiliates, including several from the Yale Department of Psychiatry, have been awarded research grants through the Brain & Behavior Foundation’s NARSAD Young Investigator Grant Program.
The foundation in 2016 has awarded $13.7 million in 198 new two-year grant awards “to support the work of promising young scientists with innovative ideas in mental health research.” The awards are highly competitive; 761 applications were received.
The awards are categorized in the areas of basic research (to understand what happens in the brain to cause mental illness), new technologies (to advance or create new ways of studying and understanding the brain), and next generation therapies (to reduce symptoms of mental illness and ultimately cure and prevent brain and behavior disorders).
Receiving grants from Yale are:
Basic Research
Autism Spectrum Disorder
Anahita Amiri, PhD, will explore genetic activity that alters brain activity in autism spectrum disorders.
Jessica Mariani, PhD, will explore how changes in the 3D organization of DNA can alter gene expression and neurodevelopment, leading to autism spectrum disorders.
Maximiliano Rapanelli, PhD, is interested in the role of the basal ganglia in autism spectrum disorder, using a new rodent model in which two specific types of interneuron in the striatum (the large input nucleus of the basal ganglia) are depleted.
Depression
Janitza Liz Montalvo-Ortiz, PhD, will explore why sexual abuse during childhood is a major risk factor for the development of depression later in life.
Eric Steven Wohleb, PhD, observes that stress-induced depressive symptoms are linked to pyramidal neuron atrophy and synaptic deficits in the medial prefrontal cortex. His project will focus on microglia, immune cells in the brain, directed by neuron-derived signals which have a functional role in modulating synaptic plasticity.
Mental Illness – Multiple
Dongju Seo, PhD, wants to know more about factors linking major depression (MDD) and alcohol abuse, which, when comorbid, result in poor treatment outcomes, frequent relapse, and greater likelihood of suicidal attempts than in people with MDD alone.
Schizophrenia
Youngsun Theresa Cho, MD, PhD, will use translational neuroimaging and other methods to test if cognitive performance changes in response to rewards, and if the magnitude of cognitive deficits predicts the lack of desire to engage in pleasurable activities often seen in schizophrenia, and how the brain may carry out these processes in patients with schizophrenia.
Jason Karl Johannesen, PhD, will use the McGurk effect, a well-studied illusion that arises when the timing of auditory and visual components of speech are offset, to study schizophrenia in adolescents.
Toral S. Surti, PhD, will study sleep spindles, which are short bursts of neural oscillations measured in EEG that occur during sleep and are associated with cognitive ability. This study will test whether the reduction of sleep spindles in schizophrenia predicts deficient sleep-dependent learning on two tasks.
Next Generation Therapies
Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
Gustavo Adolfo Angarita, MD, will examine the potential of Vitamin D to treat ADHD when given with commonly used stimulant medications. Stimulants can treat ADHD symptoms by boosting the brain’s dopamine system, but they may have negative side effects and do not work for all patients.
Sjoerd Jehannes Finnema, PhD, aims to determine whether the rapid acting antidepressant ketamine normalizes synaptic density at the time of greatest antidepressant effect in people with major depression.
Depression
Samuel Wilkinson, MD, will lead a randomized, controlled trial of patients with treatment-resistant depression to investigate the potential of cognitive behavioral therapy to sustain ketamine’s antidepressant effects.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Benjamin Kelmendi, MD, hopes to learn more about the pathophysiology and treatment models for PTSD by investigating a drug known as MDMA as a potential treatment. He will conduct a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study of the effects of MDMA on PTSD patients.
Fragile X Syndrome
Manavi Chatterjee, PhD, is studying Fragile X syndrome, which is usually caused by a switched-off Fmr1 gene that encodes Fragile X mental retardation protein. Chatterjee will test whether a compound called TC-2153, which inhibits an enzyme in the central nervous system called STEP, is of therapeutic value in mouse models of Fragile X syndrome.