Established | 1987 |
---|---|
Faculty | 23 |
Staff | 180 |
Location | Portland , Oregon , USA |
Website | https://www.ohsu.edu/xd/research/centers-institutes/vollum/ |
The Vollum Institute is an independent research institute located in Marquam Hill Campus of the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) in southwest Portland, Oregon, USA. The institute is closely affiliated with the School of Medicine and many other the universities nearby. [1]
The institute was founded in 1987, and is a privately endowed organization named after Howard Vollum, a pioneer in the development of oscilloscopes and the co-founder of Tektronix. The research support for the faculty comes from the National Institutes of Health, federally sponsored programs, and also from the private funds of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the endowment created by Howard Vollum, which is controlled by the Oregon Health and Science University Foundation. [1]
The institute's building was designed by Robert Frasca of Zimmer-Gunsul-Frasca, and the 67,000 square foot structure was completed in 1987. In 1988, the institute received the Laboratory of the Year award from the Research and Development magazine. [2]
There are currently 23 faculty scientists, 180 research staffs, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students. The scientists of the institute are doing research on chemicals; glutamate, dopamine mediate neuronal communication, studying how brain function is disrupted in diseases like epilepsy, sound is produced in electrical signals in hearing pathways, proteins signal govern cell death development, and the reason why the synaptic connections between neurons grows stronger or weaker. They also study how the psychiatric drugs and drug abuse meditate therapeutic and actions that are actually harmful. [1]
In 2013, the Vollum Institute research gave a new insight on how anti-depressants work in the brain by publishing two papers on neurotransmission which was one of the issue in Nature , focusing on the structure of the dopamine transportor that helps to regulate the brain's dopamine levels. [3]
The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center is a public academic health science center in Dallas, Texas. With approximately 23,000 employees, more than 3,000 full-time faculty, and nearly 4 million outpatient visits per year, UT Southwestern is the largest medical school in the University of Texas System and the State of Texas.
Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) is a public research university focusing primarily on health sciences with a main campus, including two hospitals, in Portland, Oregon. The institution was founded in 1887 as the University of Oregon Medical Department and later became the University of Oregon Medical School. In 1974, the campus became an independent, self-governed institution called the University of Oregon Health Sciences Center, combining state dentistry, medicine, nursing, and public health programs into a single center. It was renamed Oregon Health Sciences University in 1981 and took its current name in 2001, as part of a merger with the Oregon Graduate Institute (OGI), in Hillsboro. The university has several partnership programs including a joint PharmD Pharmacy program with Oregon State University in Corvallis.
Neuropharmacology is the study of how drugs affect function in the nervous system, and the neural mechanisms through which they influence behavior. There are two main branches of neuropharmacology: behavioral and molecular. Behavioral neuropharmacology focuses on the study of how drugs affect human behavior (neuropsychopharmacology), including the study of how drug dependence and addiction affect the human brain. Molecular neuropharmacology involves the study of neurons and their neurochemical interactions, with the overall goal of developing drugs that have beneficial effects on neurological function. Both of these fields are closely connected, since both are concerned with the interactions of neurotransmitters, neuropeptides, neurohormones, neuromodulators, enzymes, second messengers, co-transporters, ion channels, and receptor proteins in the central and peripheral nervous systems. Studying these interactions, researchers are developing drugs to treat many different neurological disorders, including pain, neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease, psychological disorders, addiction, and many others.
Charles Howard Vollum was an American electronics engineer, businessman, and philanthropist in Oregon, United States. He was the co-founder of Tektronix Corporation, and endowed the Vollum Institute.
Sanford Burnham Prebys is a 501(c)(3) non-profit medical research institute focusing on basic and translational research, with major research programs in cancer, neurodegeneration, diabetes, infectious, inflammatory, and childhood diseases. The institute also specializes in stem cell research and drug discovery technologies.
Nora D. Volkow is a Mexican-American psychiatrist. She is currently the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Paul Brehm is a researcher at the Vollum Institute at Oregon Health and Science University. It was during a seminar by Brehm that Martin Chalfie became inspired to work on Green fluorescent protein for which Chalfie shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008.
The OGI School of Science and Engineering, located in Hillsboro, Oregon, United States was one of four schools at the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU). Until June 2001, it functioned independently as a private graduate school, the Oregon Graduate Institute of Science & Technology (OGI). OGI operated four departments and had approximately 330 students. In 2008, the school's name was changed to the Department of Science and Engineering and by 2010, the department was dissolved and the academic programs and research were disseminated to other OHSU institutes and departments.
Michael Cowley FTSE is an Australian physiologist. He is best known for his mapping of the neural circuits involved in metabolism and obesity and diabetes treatment. He is a professor in the Department of Physiology at Monash University in the Faculty of Biomedical and Psychological Sciences. He is also a director of the Australian diabetes drug development company, Verva Inc, and director of the Monash Obesity & Diabetes Institute] (modi).
Brian J. Druker is a physician-scientist at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), in Portland, Oregon. He is the director of OHSU's Knight Cancer Institute, JELD-WEN Chair of Leukemia Research, Associate Dean for Oncology in the OHSU School of Medicine, and professor of medicine.
Moussa B. H. Youdim is an internationally renowned Israeli neuroscientist specializing in neurochemistry and neuropharmacology. He is the discoverer of both monoamine oxidase (MAO) B inhibitors l-deprenyl (Selegiline) and rasagiline (Azilect) as anti-Parkinson drugs which possess neuroprotective activities. He is currently professor emeritus at Technion - Faculty of Medicine and President of Youdim Pharmaceuticals.
Michael J. Kuhar, is an American neuroscientist, author, and Candler Professor of Neuropharmacology at The Emory National Primate Research Center of Emory University. He is a Georgia Research Alliance eminent scholar, and a senior fellow in the Center for Ethics at Emory. He was previously a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and branchchief at the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
The Oregon Graduate Center was a unique, private, postgraduate-only research university in Washington County, Oregon, on the west side of Portland, from 1963 to 2001. The center was renamed the Oregon Graduate Institute in 1989. The Institute merged with the Oregon Health Sciences University in 2001, and became the OGI School of Science and Engineering within the (renamed) Oregon Health & Science University. The School was discontinued in 2008 and its campus in 2014. Demolition of the campus buildings began February 2017.
Richard Alan North FRS is a British biomedical scientist, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Manchester. North grew up in Halifax, West Yorkshire and attended Heath Grammar School, before studying at University of Aberdeen. He graduated in medicine and in physiology (BSc). He took a PhD in the group of Hans Walter Kosterlitz, and worked in Aberdeen hospitals as house office and registrar.
Eric Gouaux is an American biochemist and biophysicist who holds the Jennifer and Bernard Lacroute Term Chair at the Vollum Institute at the Oregon Health & Science University.
Gail Mandel is a senior scientist at the Vollum Institute and a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Oregon Health & Science University. From 1997 to 2016 she was an investigator with Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 2008 she was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Bita Moghaddam is an Iranian-American neuroscientist and author. She is currently the Ruth Matarazzo Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience at Oregon Health & Science University. Moghaddam investigates the neuronal processes underlying emotion and cognition as a first step to designing strategies to treat and prevent brain illnesses.
Melissa Anne Haendel is an American bioinformaticist who is the Chief Research Informatics Officer of the Anschutz Medical Campus of the University of Colorado as well as a Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics and the Marsico Chair in Data Science. She serves as Director of the Center for Data to Health (CD2H). Her research makes use of data to improve the discovery and diagnosis of diseases. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Haendel joined with the National Institutes of Health to launch the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C), which looks to identify the risk factors that can predict severity of disease outcome and help to identify treatments.
Marina Elizabeth Wolf is an American neuroscientist and Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience at Oregon Health & Science University. Previously she served as Professor and Chair of the Department of Neuroscience in the Chicago Medical School at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science. She has been a pioneer in studying the role of neuronal plasticity in drug addiction. Her laboratory is particularly interested in understanding why individuals recovering from substance use disorder remain vulnerable to drug craving and relapse even after long periods of abstinence.
Edward Neuwelt is an American professor of neurology and neurosurgery at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) and the Portland Veterans Affairs Medical Center. He is known for his research on the blood-brain barrier and the development of new treatments for brain tumors.