Brain & Behavior Research Foundation Announces 2024 Klerman & Freedman Prizes for Innovative Psychiatric Research
2024年7月30日 - 3:07AM
The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF) today
announced the winners of its 2024 Klerman and Freedman Prizes
recognizing exceptional clinical and basic research in mental
illness. The prizes are awarded annually to honor the work of
outstanding scientists who have been supported by the Foundation’s
Young Investigator Grants Program. “The 2024 Klerman and Freedman
prize winners are being recognized for their significant findings
related to suicide prevention, PTSD, substance-use disorders,
autism, brain biology, and therapeutic drug development,” said
Jeffrey Borenstein, M.D., President and CEO of the Brain &
Behavior Research Foundation. “Their important work is advancing
the development of diagnostic tools, the identification of
effective and targeted treatments, and paving the way toward
prevention of mental illness. We celebrate these scientists, and we
thank our generous donors for supporting scientists in brain and
behavior research.”
The prizewinners are selected by the BBRF Scientific Council
comprised of 192 pre-eminent mental health researchers.
Since its founding in 1987, the Foundation has awarded more than
$450 million to more than 5,400 scientists around the world. The
Klerman and Freedman Prizes are named for Gerald Klerman, M.D., and
Daniel Freedman, M.D., whose legacies as researchers, teachers,
physicians, and administrators have indelibly influenced
neuropsychiatry. Five scientists received recognition for their
outstanding work in brain and behavior research:
2024 Klerman Prize for Exceptional Clinical
ResearchJuliet Beni Edgcomb, M.D., Ph.D., University of
California, Los Angeles
Dr. Edgcomb seeks to develop a set of rules for clearly
identifying children and adolescents with suicide-related symptoms
from within complex electronic health record (EHR) data. This would
be a significant step forward in suicide prevention. She has worked
with an EHR “training set” that includes data from 400 children and
adolescents, to identify those presenting to healthcare providers
with suicidal thoughts and behaviors. The aim is to identify the
predictive variables best defining each pertinent phenotype and to
produce a predicted probability of each suicide-related phenotype
for each child. She has recently expanded this research to develop
and validate methods to detect suicide-related visits among 3,400
children.
2024 Freedman Prize for Exceptional Basic Research
Christina K. Kim, Ph.D., University of California,
Davis
Dr. Kim seeks to develop new methodologies for recording and
perturbing neuronal activity in animal models, specifically in
brain regions implicated in neuropsychiatric diseases. Her lab
engineers technologies to identify molecular biomarkers in neurons
modulated by novel therapeutic drugs for treating depression and
anxiety. She aims to determine which specific neurons and molecules
can be targeted to improve disease symptoms. The hope is that an
understanding of the targeted cellular mechanisms of therapeutic
drugs in the brain can serve as the basis for designing
modifications to these agents to increase their specificity and
reduce their undesired side effects.
2024 Klerman Prize Honorable MentionElizabeth
V. Goldfarb, Ph.D., Yale University
The goal of Dr. Goldfarb’s lab is to understand how stress
changes the way we remember our lives and the consequences of these
memories for later behavior. Her research takes a translational
cognitive neuroscience approach that combines experimental tasks
that measure different types of memories, analyses of brain
responses using functional magnetic resonance imaging, and
assessments of physiological responses and real-world behavior. The
aim of her work is to identify memory markers of resilient
responses to trauma and reveal targets for memory-related
therapeutic interventions. 2024 Freedman Prize Honorable
MentionErin Gibson, Ph.D., Stanford University
Dr. Gibson is studying the role of the circadian system in
homeostatic processes, including neuroendocrine, immune, and neural
stem-cell regulation. Dr. Gibson’s lab seeks greater understanding
of how glial cells, among the non-neuronal cells of the brain,
modulate neural circuits throughout development and in brain
disorders, with a focus on the intersection between sleep and glial
biology in disorders such as autism spectrum disorders, multiple
sclerosis, and Alzheimer’s disease.
2024 Freedman Prize Honorable MentionHugo A.
Tejeda, Ph.D., National Institute of Mental Health
Dr. Tejada’s research focuses on the role of neuromodulation in
processing information in limbic neural circuits under
physiological conditions in in psychiatric disorders. Areas of
interest include understanding how neuropeptides in cortical
circuits regulate circuit function to regulate threat appraisal and
the role of dopamine in shaping motivation and reinforcement
through actions in brain reward circuitry.About the Brain
& Behavior Research FoundationThe Brain & Behavior
Research Foundation awards research grants to develop improved
treatments, cures, and methods of prevention for mental illness.
These illnesses include addiction, ADHD, anxiety, autism, bipolar
disorder, borderline personality disorder, depression, eating
disorders, OCD, PTSD, and schizophrenia, as well as research on
suicide prevention. Since 1987, the Foundation has awarded more
than $450 million to fund more than 5,400 leading scientists around
the world. 100% of every dollar donated for research is invested in
research. BBRF operating expenses are covered by separate
foundation grants. BBRF is the producer of the Emmy® nominated
public television series Healthy Minds with Dr. Jeffrey Borenstein,
which aims to remove the stigma of mental illness and demonstrate
that with help, there is hope.
- 2024 Klerman and Freedman Awards
Myrna Manners
Brain & Behavior Research Foundation
(718) 986-7255
mmanners@mannersdotson.com