 The Young Investigator Award Program provides support for promising young scientists conducting research into schizophrenia, major affective disorders or other serious mental illnesses. |
Employing the latest in genomics technology to identify genes that may be responsible for mental illness has earned two prestigious awards for Dr. Alexander Niculescu III.
The IU School of Medicine neuroscientist is the recipient of the American Psychiatric Association AstraZeneca Young Minds in Psychiatry International Award and the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression Young Investigator Award.
The AstraZeneca award, which includes a $45,000 prize, will be presented to Niculescu May 24 at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Atlanta.
An assistant professor of psychiatry and a scientist with the Institute for Psychiatric Research, he is the U.S. recipient for research into bipolar disorders for 2005. Only three other awards are presented: one for a researcher outside the United States studying bipolar disorder and two (one in and one outside the U.S.) researching schizophrenia.
The NARSAD Award for 2005-2007 includes $60,000 in funding for research. The Young Investigator Award Program provides support for promising young scientists conducting research into schizophrenia, major affective disorders or other serious mental illnesses. Niculescu is interested in translational research approaches to understanding psychiatric disorders. He has developed an approach, termed Convergent Functional Genomics, for identifying candidate genes, pathways and mechanisms for neuropsychiatric disorders.
The approach is based on the integration of gene expression profiling and his lab has applied this approach to bipolar and related disorders. He currently is pursuing collaborative studies using this approach in schizophrenia and alcohol abuse. He also is particularly interested in circadian clock genes as candidate genes for cycling and switching in bipolar disorders.
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