The Yale Department of Psychiatry is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2023 Seymour Lustman Awards for Psychiatric Neuroscience and the 2023 Detre Awards for Psychiatric Research.
Lustman Awards
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Lustman Award, which was first given in the 1973-1974 academic year. The award is named for Seymour L. Lustman, MD, PhD, a storied faculty member in both the Department of Psychiatry and the Child Study Center and one of the authors of the classic text “Beyond the Best Interests of the Child” (together with Anna Freud, among others). He died tragically in 1971 at the age of 51.
The awards have been generously supported for 50 years by the Lustman Family Foundation. The department is grateful to the foundation and its board: Susan Katz, Jeffrey Lustman, Emily Lustman, Barbara Nordhaus, and Sam Chauncey.
This year’s honorees will present their award-winning research at Grand Rounds on Friday, May 26.
They are:
- AZA Stephen Allsop, MD, PhD, co-first place, for his paper, “An unbiased method to partition diverse neuronal responses into functional ensembles during social behavior.”
- Sarah Jefferson, MD, PhD, co-first place, for her paper, “5-MeO-DMT modifies innate behaviors and promotes structural neural plasticity in mice.”
- Yang Jae Lee, MD, honorable mention, for his published and unpublished work describing an innovative program to combat stigma against those struggling with mental illness in rural Uganda.
Detre Awards
Four trainees in the Department of Psychiatry and Child Study Center have been named recipients of the 2022-23 Thomas P. Detre Fellowship Awards in Translational Neuroscience Research in Psychiatry.
The awards support translational research endeavors of residents enrolled (or interested in enrolling) in the Neuroscience Research Training Program (NRTP) in Psychiatry and, for the first time this academic year, the Solnit Integrated Training Program at the Yale Child Study Center.
Recipients receive $30,000 in support of their projects and training.
The award recipients are:
- Tova Gardin, MD, a member of the NRTP who is also in the Department of Neurology: “Single Cell Transcriptomic Analysis of Immune Cell Dysregulation in Psychosis.” Gardin’s Detre Award is supported by Biohaven, Ltd.
- Sarah Jefferson, MD, PhD: “Mechanistic and Behavioral Investigation of 5-HT2AR Agonist-induced Neural Plasticity.” Jefferson’s Detre Award is generously supported by the Coric Family Foundation.
- Yang Jae Lee, MD: “Development and Evaluation of a Radio Drama to Increase Mental Health Care Seeking Behaviors and Reduce Stigma in a Low Resource Setting.”
- Jacob Lister, MD, PhD, a member of the Solnit Combined Program in Child, Adolescent, and Adult Psychiatry: “Ketamine for Depression and Suicidality in Adolescents: Identifying Predictive Phenotypes of Treatment Response using Functional Connectomes and Metabolites.”
The Detre Awards were established in memory of Dr. Thomas Detre, an internationally renowned academic psychiatrist, esteemed Yale Psychiatry faculty member/alumnus, and chair of psychiatry, vice chancellor of health services, and dean at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
The award, now in its 11th year, has been generously funded by departmental alumni. New support this year comes from Biohaven, Ltd., and from the Coric Family Foundation.