22 October 2009. On Friday, 30 October 2009, NARSAD will honor their 2009 prize-winning scientists at their annual NYC Mental Health Research Symposium and later in the evening at NARSAD’s annual gala at the Pierre in NYC. The program will kick off with presentations from the four lifetime acheivement awardees, and will wrap up with five presentations by NARSAD’s Young Investigator Award recipients.

This year’s Lieber Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Schizophrenia Research has been awarded to Raquel Gur and Ruben Gur, professors in the department of psychiatry at The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the Philadelphia Veterans Administration Medical Center. The Gurs’ research incorporates genetics, brain imaging, and studies of gender differences to brain function and mental illness, particularly schizophrenia. In particular, Raquel Gur’s emphasis is in studies that integrate clinical research with neurobiology and genetics. Gur and other members of the Penn group are participating in a multi-institutional study, launched with a $9.8 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), to pinpoint environmentally induced genetic changes that may affect the onset of schizophrenia.

The Falcone Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Mood Disorders Research has been given to Eric Nestler, Nash Family Professor, Chair of the Department of Neuroscience, and Director of the Brain Institute at Mount Sinai School of Medicine; and Lewis Judd, Mary Gilman Marston Professor and Chair, Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

Nestler and his team apply animal models to explore the brain pathways that regulate responses to natural rewards such as food, sex, and social interaction, and how abuse of drugs and stress induce changes in these pathways. Their findings have established that drug- and stress-induced changes in reward pathways mediate long-lived behavioral changes relevant to addiction and depression.

At UCSD, Judd heads a broad program of clinical and basic research and training focused on severe mental disorders throughout the life cycle. Judd’s own research has focused on the course, recovery, and outcome of mood and anxiety disorders and their management by psychopharmacologic medications. During his 35-year career at UCSD, Judd also served (1987-1990) as Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), where he organized “The Decade of the Brain,” a plan launched as a Presidential Proclamation to increase U.S.-based neuroscience research.

The Ruane Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Research has been awarded to E. Jane Costello, Professor, Associate Director for Research at the Center for Child & Family Policy, Developmental Epidemiology, Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Division of Medical Psychology, School of Medicine; and Adrien C. Angold, director of the Center for Developmental Epidemiology at Duke University.

Angold and Costello co-direct the Center for Developmental Epidemiology at the Duke University Medical Center, where researchers from different disciplines focus on understanding the origins, course, and prevention of mental illness across the life span. Specifically, the center integrates developmental science and epidemiology to study psychiatric disorders in childhood and adolescence. The center’s longest-running study, the Great Smoky Mountains Study, was developed as a longitudinal assessment of psychiatric and substance abuse disorders and access to mental health care in a representative sample of 1,400 children and adolescents living in the southeastern United States. The study provided policy-relevant information on the need for mental health services, risks for emotional and behavioral disorders, outcomes of serious emotional disorders, use of mental health services across sectors, and effectiveness of mental health services.

The Goldman-Rakic Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Cognitive Neuroscience goes to Brenda Milner, Dorothy J. Killam Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery at the Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University. For nearly 60 years Milner has focused on the study of congnitive functioning and the brain mechanisms involved with thinking, reasoning, learning, and remembering. These studies helped to establish that people have multiple memory systems, governing different activities such as language or motor skills. Milner also conducted much of the early work that showed how the hemispheres of the brain interact, an area she is still exploring and which has had an enormous impact on understanding of learning, language, sensations, and emotions. She is perhaps most broadly known in science for her pioneering studies of the famous patient “HM”, whose short-term memory deficits helped reveal the functions of the hippocampus in learning and memory.

NARSAD Scientific Council member and Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel described Milner’s work as having created the field of cognitive neuroscience by merging neurology and psychology.

This year’s Sidney R. Baer, Jr. Prize for Schizophrenia Research—traditionally selected by the year’s Lieber Prize recipients—is being awarded to Daniel H. Wolf, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. Wolf’s work involves examining the pathophysiology of the so-called negative symptoms—the social and emotional deficits—as well as the cognitive deficits experienced by people with schizophrenia. By combining pharmacological challenges and functional magnetic resonance neuroimaging (fMRI) with detailed clinical and behavioral assessments, Wolf hopes to relate specific negative symptoms to dysfunction in emotion processing circuits in the brain, and to develop better methods for assessing novel therapeutic interventions.—Angela Epshtein.