The Burroughs Wellcome Fund has awarded its 2018 Career Award for Medical Scientists (CAMS) to Al Powers, MD, PhD, Clinical Instructor in the Yale Department of Psychiatry and Medical Director of the PRIME Psychosis Research Clinic at Yale.
Powers has also been selected as recipient of the 2018 Klerman Prize by the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF). The award, given annually, recognizes exceptional clinical and basic research conducted by NARSAD Young Investigator Grantees.
The CAMS award is given to physician-scientists across all medical specialties who are committed to an academic career. The award provides $700,000 in research and salary support over five years. Powers is the first Yale recipient since the award’s inception in 2007.
The award will begin on Sept. 1. Powers and other awardees will be honored Oct. 9 and 10 at the Burroughs Wellcome Fund office in Research Triangle Park, NC.
The Burroughs Wellcome Fund is an independent private foundation dedicated to advancing the biomedical sciences by supporting research and other scientific and educational activities. The fund’s goals are to help scientists early in their careers develop as independent investigators, and to advance fields in the basic biomedical sciences that are undervalued or in need of particular encouragement.
The BBRF Klerman Prize was established in 1994 by Myrna M. Weissman, PhD, a former Yale Department of Psychiatry faculty member and BBRF Scientific Council member, in memory of her late husband, Gerald L. Klerman, MD. The award recognizes young researchers whose work in depression, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease, anorexia nervosa, and autism spectrum disorders further advance the quest to identify the biological roots of mental illness, develop new diagnostic tools, more effective and targeted treatments, and pave the way toward prevention.
Powers, a Yale Psychiatry Residency Program graduate, treats people who suffer from the symptoms of early psychosis. He also uses computational approaches to understand how sensory systems might go awry to produce hallucinations and other symptoms of psychosis.