Research Highlights advisory panel

Papers and web sites in the Research Highlights section of Nature Reviews Neuroscience are chosen with the aid of the following advisors:

Nancy Andreasen

Nancy Andreasen received a doctorate in English from the University of Nebraska, then earned her medical degree from the University of Iowa in 1970. Andreasen joined the University of Iowa medical faculty as an assistant professor of psychiatry in 1973, became full professor in 1981 and served as director of the UI Mental Health Clinical Research Center for more than a decade. She was appointed to the UI Andrew H. Woods Chair of Psychiatry in 1997. Andreasen has served as chair of the International Advisory Board for the Nobel Symposium on Schizophrenia and is Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Psychiatry. She is a member of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Science, and has served on the NIMH National Advisory Mental Health Council. Her awards include the Adolf Meyer Award; the American Psychiatric Association Prize for Research; the Dean Award from the American College of Psychiatrists; the Distinguished Service Award from the American College of Psychiatrists; The Lieber Prize for Outstanding Research in Schizophrenia, the Robert Sommer Award; the Institute of Medicine's Rhoda and Bernard Sarnat International Prize in Mental Health; and the National Medal of Science. Her current research involves using imaging techniques to study neuroanatomic and cognitive abnormalities that occur in disease states, such as schizophrenia or autism.

Allan Basbaum

After undergraduate work with Ron Melzack at McGill University, Allan Basbaum received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania before doing postdoctoral research with Patrick Wall at University College London. At present, he is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anatomy, University of California at San Francisco, and a member of the W. M. Keck Foundation Center for Integrative Neuroscience. His research examines spinal cord circuits that transmit pain, and mechanisms that underlie opioid analgesia and tolerance development. His recent studies have focused on the molecular basis of persistent pain states. He is a recipient of the Bristol Myers Squibb Prize for Distinguished Pain Research.

Randy Buckner

Randy Buckner is an Assistant Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is also Assistant Professor of Psychology at Washington University in St Louis, and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Neurobiology and Radiology at the Washington University Medical School. He received his B.A. in psychology, and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in psychology and neuroscience, from Washington University. He trained with Bruce Rosen as a postdoctoral fellow, and later as Instructor of Radiology at the Harvard Medical School, where he developed and applied functional magnetic resonance imaging methods to study human memory. His current research explores the functional anatomy of human memory in young adults and in older adults with progressive dementia.

David Clapham

David Clapham was trained in electrical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and obtained his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees with Louis DeFelice and Robert DeHaan from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He completed his residency in internal medicine at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, and his postdoctoral training with Erwin Neher at the Max Planck Institute in G�ttingen, Germany. After several years as a faculty member of the Mayo Clinic, he moved to the Children's Hospital in Boston, where he directs cardiovascular research. He is Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Pietro De Camilli

Pietro De Camilli is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Professor of Cell Biology at Yale University School of Medicine. He received his M.D. from the University of Milano, Italy, and was a postdoctoral fellow with Paul Greengard at Yale University. Before taking up his current position, he held appointments at both Yale and the University of Milano. He is a cellular neurobiologist whose main focus of research addresses the molecular mechanisms underlying the function of the presynaptic compartment. His studies on synaptic vesicle dynamics have contributed to the general field of exocytosis and endocytosis, and have influenced the field of neuroimmunology.

Barry Everitt

Barry Everitt graduated with a B.Sc. in zoology and completed a Ph.D. in behavioural neuroendocrinology at the University of Birmingham Medical School in 1970. Following postdoctoral research at the Karolinska Institutet with Tomas H�kfelt and Kjell Fuxe, he joined the Department of Anatomy at the University of Cambridge as a lecturer, then Reader in Neuroscience. In 1995, he moved to the Department of Experimental Psychology in Cambridge, and was appointed to a personal Professorship in Behavioural Neuroscience in 1997. He is former President of the British Association for Psychopharmacology and the European Brain and Behaviour Society. He chaired the Long-term Fellowships Committee (Brain Functions) of the Human Frontier Science Program, and has been heavily involved with the development of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies. At present, he is Editor-in-Chief of The European Journal of Neuroscience. His research interests are centred on the neuropsychology of motivation and reward, learning, memory, and attention. A key focus of this research concerns the functions of limbic and prefrontal-corticostriatal loops in these processes, and the way they are modulated by the diffuse ascending projection systems of the brain. Much of his research in these areas is undertaken within the context of drug addiction, especially the neural and psychological mechanisms that underlie addiction to cocaine and heroin.

Gord Fishell

Gord Fishell received his Ph.D. in neurobiology from the University of Toronto in 1989. From 1989 to 1992, he was a postdoctoral fellow with M. E. Hatten at Columbia University, and was an Assistant Professor at the Rockefeller University from 1992 to 1994. Since the autumn of 1994, he has been a member of the Skirball Institute's Developmental Genetics Program and the Department of Cell Biology at New York University Medical Center. Fishell and his group study the mechanisms that pattern the mammalian telencephalon, with a focus on the interface between regional patterning and the control of neuronal stem cells.

Mary Kennedy

Mary Kennedy is Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology, where she has been on the faculty since 1981. She earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Johns Hopkins in 1975, and began her studies on neuronal biochemistry during postdoctoral work at Harvard Medical School. In the early 1980s, her group discovered the regulation of calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II by autophosphorylation, and identified this enzyme as a prominent component of the postsynaptic density. This work led to the discovery that the postsynaptic density contains a large complex of signalling proteins linked to the NMDA (N-methyl-D-aspartate) receptor. At present, she and her group are working to understand biochemical signal processing by the NMDA receptor complex.

Lynn Nadel

Lynn Nadel received his Ph.D. from McGill University in 1967, after which he was a postdoctoral fellow with Jan Bures in Prague (1967-1970). He spent six years in London with the Cerebral Functions Research Group, where he co-authored The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map with John O'Keefe. After brief stays in San Diego, Halifax (Dalhousie), and at the University of California at Irvine, he went to Arizona in 1985, where he has served as Head of Psychology since 1989. His research focuses on the hippocampus, memory, and spatial cognition, and on various implications of the cognitive map theory for understanding context, stress and trauma, mental retardation in Down's syndrome, and consciousness. He has been co-Director of the Complex Systems Summer School, held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, since 1990.

Dennis O'Leary

Dennis O'Leary is Professor in the Molecular Neurobiology Laboratory at The Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. He and his colleagues study vertebrate neural development, with an emphasis on the visual system and the mammalian cortex as model systems. They use in vivo and in vitro experimental approaches to study axon guidance and target recognition, cell specification and fate, and parcellation of the forebrain into functionally specialized domains. He earned a Ph.D. in neural sciences at Washington University, St Louis, in 1983, and did his postdoctoral training at The Salk Institute. He returned to St Louis in 1986 to take a faculty position at Washington University School of Medicine, rising to the rank of tenured Associate Professor before returning to The Salk Institute in 1990, where he was promoted to Professor in 1993. Among his honours, O'Leary received the Young Investigator Award from the Society for Neuroscience in 1991, a Decade of the Brain Medal from the American Association of Neurological Surgeons in 1996, and the Capputto Memorial Award from the Argentina Society for Neurochemistry in 1999. He has been a Senior Editor of The Journal of Neuroscience since 1993.

Terrence Sejnowski

Terrence Sejnowski is an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Professor at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where he directs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory. He is also Professor of Biology and Adjunct Professor in the Departments of Physics, Neurosciences, Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, where he is Director of the Institute for Neural Computation. Sejnowski received a B.S. in physics from the Case-Western Reserve University, an M.A. in physics from Princeton University, and a Ph.D. in physics, also from Princeton University, in 1978. From 1978 to 1982, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biology at Princeton University, and then in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. In 1982, he joined the faculty of the Department of Biophysics at the Johns Hopkins University, where he achieved the rank of Professor before moving to San Diego in 1988; he received a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1984, and was a Wiersma Visiting Professor of Neurobiology at the California Institute of Technology in 1987. With Patricia Churchland, he wrote The Computational Brain, published in 1992. He was a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at the California Institute of Technology from 1993 to 1994, and was a part-time Visiting Professor from 1995 to 1998. In 1996, he received the Wright Prize from the Harvey Mudd College for excellence in interdisciplinary research, and was awarded the Hebb Prize for his contributions to learning algorithms by the International Neural Network Society in 1999. He was elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2000. In 1988, Sejnowski founded Neural Computation, the leading journal in the area of neural networks and computational neuroscience. He is President of the Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation, a non-profit organization which oversees the annual Neural Information ProcessingSytems conference. The long-term goal of his research is to build linking principles from brain to behaviour using computational models. This goal is being pursued with a combination of theoretical and experimental approaches at several levels of investigation, ranging from the biophysical level to the systems level.

Wolf Singer

Wolf Singer is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research. He was born in 1943 in Munich, Germany, and studied medicine at the University of Munich, completing his third year on an exchange to the University of Paris. In 1968, he completed his thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry. After obtaining his licence to practice general medicine, he went on to the University of Sussex to acquaint himself more closely with methods of psychophysical examination. There he completed his postdoctoral training in psychophysics and animal behaviour in the Department of Psychology. In 1972, he joined the Department of Neurophysiology at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry. On attaining the qualification to lecture at the university, he was offered a position at the University of Bielefeld, and, two years later, at the Brain Research Institute of the University of Zurich. Since 1980, he has been Director of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt. Singer is a member of the editorial boards of many journals in the field of neuroscience, including Behavioral Brain Research, Trends in Neuroscience and the Journal of Neurophysiology. He has been the President of the European Neuroscience Association and is on the board of the European Science Foundation. His laboratory focuses on the functional organization of the cerebral cortex, and on use-dependent synaptic plasticity during development and in the adult system. Since the discovery of synchronous firing in the visual cortex in the mid-1980s, he has pursued the hypothesis that synchronization of distributed responses serves as a signature of relatedness in distributed parallel processing in the cerebral cortex. Singer examines the possibility that response synchronization serves the dynamic binding of neuronal responses into coherent population codes, thereby creating representations that are complementary to single cell codes.

Claudio Stern

Claudio Stern was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1954, and took his first degree in the biological sciences at the University of Sussex in 1975. This was followed by a D.Phil. in developmental biology, also at the University of Sussex, in 1978, and postdoctoral training with Ruth Bellairs at University College London until 1984. Later periods at both Cambridge and Oxford were followed by his appointment as Professor and Chairman of Genetics and Development at Columbia University (1994-2000). Stern is currently the J. Z. Young Professor and Head of the Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology, University College London. He has been the Editor of Mechanisms of Development and has served on the editorial advisory boards of Cell, Development, The International Journal of Developmental Biology and BioMed Central. His research interests include early embryonic development and embryonic polarity (head-tail and left-right), inductive interactions in early development, molecular mechanisms of neural induction, and early patterning of the central and peripheral nervous systems.

Patrick Tam

Patrick Tam is a Senior Principal Research Fellow of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Sydney, and the Head of Embryology Unit at the Children's Medical Research Institute. His research focuses on the elucidation of the cellular and molecular mechanisms of tissue patterning and the development of the craniofacial structures in the mouse embryo. Specifically, he examines the morphogenetic role of the mouse gastrula organizer in patterning the neural primordium during early embryogenesis. He pioneers the application of micromanipulation and embryo culture for analysing tissue potency and lineage specification in mutant embryos generated by gene targeting.

Richard Tsien

Richard Tsien is the George D. Smith Professor of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University School of Medicine, California. A native of China, Tsien came to the United States in 1965 to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology College of Electrical Engineering. He has carried out research on the molecular mechanisms of neuronal calcium channels and the molecular mechanisms of long-term potentiation in memory. At present, his research involves investigations into synaptic plasticity and neuronal gene expression.

Rafael Yuste

Rafael Yuste obtained his M.D. at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid and completed his Ph.D. with Larry Katz in Torsten Wiesel's laboratory at Rockefeller University. He was a postdoctoral student with David Tank at Bell Labs, and is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University. He is interested in dendritic integration, spine motility and function, and in the development and function of the cortical microcircuitry.

Top

Extra navigation

Subscribe

Subscribe to Nature Reviews Neuroscience

Open Innovation Challenges

naturejobs

More science jobs
Post a job for free

Advertisement