It was a bit far for George Aghajanian, MD, to travel to Seoul, Korea, last year to be presented with a Pioneer Award from The International College of Neuropsychopharmacology (CINP).
So the award came to him.
Aghajanian, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Yale, was called to the podium at the Connecticut Mental Health Center on May 5 to receive his plaque from CINP. The award was presented by John H. Krystal, MD, Robert L. McNeil, Jr. Professor of Neuroscience and Chair of the Yale Department of Psychiatry. Krystal is also President of CINP.
Krystal played stand-in for Aghajanian at the 30th CINP World Congress held in July 2016 in Seoul. In presenting the award, he called Aghajanian a pioneer in the field of neuroscience, and said he blazed a remarkable path for other researchers to follow.
The Pioneer Award is given at each Congress to three researchers who have made major contributions to the field. The contributions may be in research, clinical, or administrative areas but must be internationally recognized as significant to the growth of the field.
Aghajanian has been affiliated with the Yale Department of Psychiatry for more than 50 years. He has made numerous contributions to the field of mental health. In the 1960s, he was the first to record a single cell activity of the newly discovered monoaminergic (serotonergic, noradrenergic, and dopaminergic) neurons in the brain.
“From there, we were able to study their intrinsic electrophysiological properties as well as the effects of neurotransmitters and drugs on their function,” he said in an interview. “In essence this work established that monoaminergic neurons were regulated in a negative feedback fashion via somatodendritic autoreceptors (receptors to their own transmitter). Over succeeding decades it was shown that psychotropic drugs produced their effects acting upon presynaptic autoreceptors as well as postsynaptic receptors. This led to clinical applications such as the use of clonidine for opiate withdrawal.”
More recently, Aghajanian has collaborated with other Yale researchers to study the effects of the anesthetic ketamine on people with depression.