The National Academy of Medicine (NAM), known as the Institute of Medicine (IoM) until 2015, is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Medicine is a part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), National Academy of Engineering (NAE), and the National Research Council (NRC).
The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is one of 27 institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH, in turn, is an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and health-related research.
A neuroscientist is a scientist who has specialised knowledge in neuroscience, a branch of biology that deals with the physiology, biochemistry, psychology, anatomy and molecular biology of neurons, neural circuits, and glial cells and especially their behavioral, biological, and psychological aspect in health and disease.
Solomon Halbert Snyder is an American neuroscientist who has made wide-ranging contributions to neuropharmacology and neurochemistry. He studied at Georgetown University, and has conducted the majority of his research at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Many advances in molecular neuroscience have stemmed from Snyder's identification of receptors for neurotransmitters and drugs, and elucidation of the actions of psychotropic agents. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1978 for his research on the opioid receptor, and is one of the most highly cited researchers in the biological and biomedical sciences, with the highest h-index in those fields for the years 1983–2002, and then from 2007–2019.
George F. Koob is a Professor and former Chair of the Committee on the Neurobiology of Addictive Disorders at The Scripps Research Institute and Adjunct Professor of Psychology, Psychiatry, and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. In 2014 he became the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
John Quinn Trojanowski was an American academic research neuroscientist specializing in neurodegeneration. He and his partner, Virginia Man-Yee Lee, MBA, Ph.D., are noted for identifying the roles of three proteins in neurodegenerative diseases: tau in Alzheimer's disease, alpha-synuclein in Parkinson's disease, and TDP-43 in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal degeneration.
Steven Edward Hyman is Director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is also Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology. Hyman was Provost of Harvard University from 2001 to 2011 and before that Director of the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from 1996 to 2001. Hyman received the 2016 Rhoda and Bernard Sarnat International Prize in Mental Health from the National Academy of Medicine for "leadership in furthering understanding and treatment of psychiatric disorders as biological diseases".
Ann Martin Graybiel is an Institute Professor and a faculty member in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. She is an expert on the basal ganglia and the neurophysiology of habit formation, implicit learning, and her work is relevant to Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, obsessive–compulsive disorder, substance abuse and other disorders that affect the basal ganglia.
Thomas Roland Insel is an American neuroscientist, psychiatrist, entrepreneur, and author who led the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from 2002 until November 2015. Prior to becoming Director of NIMH, he was the founding Director of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He is best known for research on oxytocin and vasopressin, two peptide hormones implicated in complex social behaviors, such as parental care and attachment. He announced on Sept. 15, 2015, that he was resigning as the director of the NIMH to join the Life Science division of Google X. On May 8, 2017, CNBC reported that he had left Verily Life Sciences. Insel is a Co-founder with Richard Klausner and Paul Dagum of a digital mental health company named "Mindstrong," a Bay-area startup. He has also co-founded Humanest Care, NeuraWell Therapeutics, and MindSite News and is a member of the scientific advisory board for Compass Pathways, a company that is developing the psychedelic drug psilocybin to treat depression and other mental health disorders. His book, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health was published by Penguin Random House in February, 2022.
Susan Swedo is a researcher in the field of pediatrics and neuropsychiatry. Beginning in 1998, she was Chief of the Pediatrics & Developmental Neuroscience Branch at the US National Institute of Mental Health. In 1994, Swedo was lead author on a paper describing pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcal infections (PANDAS), a controversial hypothesis proposing a link between Group A streptococcal infection in children and some rapid-onset cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) or tic disorders such as Tourette syndrome. Swedo retired from the NIH in 2019, and serves on the PANDAS Physician Network.
Huda Akil is a Syrian–American neuroscientist whose pioneering research has contributed to the understanding of the neurobiology of emotions, including pain, anxiety, depression, and substance abuse. Akil and colleagues are best known for providing the first physiological evidence for a role of endorphins in the brain and demonstrating that endorphins are activated by stress and can cause pain inhibition.
William E. Bunney is a neuroscientist focused on discovering the genes that cause major depressive disorder, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder. He is a Distinguished Professor with the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior and the Della Martin Chair of Psychiatry at the University of California, Irvine. He is also the director of the UC Irvine node of the Pritzker Neuropsychiatric Disorders Research Consortium.
Yasmin Hurd is the Ward-Coleman Chair of Translational Neuroscience and the Director of the Addiction Institute at Mount Sinai. Hurd holds appointments as faculty of Neuroscience, Psychiatry, Pharmacology and Systems Therapeutics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City and is globally recognized for her translational research on the underlying neurobiology of substance use disorders and comorbid psychiatric disorders. Hurd's research on the transgenerational effects of early cannabis exposure on the developing brain and behavior and on the therapeutic properties of marijuana has garnered substantial media attention.
David McKenzie Rioch was a psychiatric research scientist and neuroanatomist, known as a pioneer in brain research and for leading the interdisciplinary neuropsychiatry division at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (1951–1970), a program that contributed to the formation of the then-nascent field of neuroscience.
Guoping Feng is a Chinese-American neuroscientist. He is the Poitras Professor of Neuroscience at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and member of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at Broad Institute. He is most notable for studying the synaptic mechanisms underlying psychiatric disease. In addition to developing many genetic-based imaging tools for the study of molecular mechanisms in the brain, he has generated and characterized rodent models of obsessive-compulsive disorder, autism spectrum disorders, and schizophrenia. Feng has also shown that some autism-like behaviors can be corrected in adult mice by manipulating the expression of the SHANK3 gene.
Arthur W. Toga is an American neuroscientist and the director of the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI) and the Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute within the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. He is also the Ghada Irani Chair in Neuroscience and provost professor of ophthalmology, neurology, psychiatry and the behavioral sciences, radiology and engineering.
Alan Charles Evans PhD FRSC FCAHS is a Welsh-born Canadian neuroscientist who is a James McGill Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery, Psychiatry and Biomedical Engineering, and holds the Victor Dahdaleh Chair in Neurosciences at McGill University. He is also a researcher at the McConnell Brain Imaging Centre of the Montreal Neurological Institute, Co-Director of the Ludmer Centre for Neuroinformatics and Mental Health, Director of the McGill Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, Scientific Director of the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform, Scientific Director of McGill's Healthy Brains, Healthy Lives program and Principal Investigator of CBRAIN, an initiative aiming to integrate Canadian neuroscience data with the Compute Canada computing network. He is recognized for his research on brain mapping, and was a co-founder of both the International Consortium for Brain Mapping and the Organization for Human Brain Mapping.
Kafui Dzirasa is an American psychiatrist and Associate Professor at Duke University. He looks to understand the relationship between neural circuit malfunction and mental illness. He was a 2019 AAAS Leshner Fellow and was elected Fellow of the National Academy of Medicine in 2021.
Joseph Thomas Coyle Jr. born in Chicago, Illinois, is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist that is known for his work on the neurobiology of mental illness, more specifically on schizophrenia. He is currently the Eben S. Draper Chair of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. He was President of the Society of Neuroscience from 1991–1992. [2] and also the president of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology in 2001, He is a member of the Institute of Medicine.
