AstraZeneca Young Minds 2004 Winners
International/Bipolar Disorder Category
Etheldreda Nakimuli-Mpungu, MBChB
Institution: Makerere University Medical School
P.O. BOX 7072 Kampala
Kampala 256, Uganda
Title of Winning Proposal: Bipolar Disorder in HIV/AIDS patients: A prospective study
Dr. Etheldreda Nakimuli-Mpungu is a postgraduate student of Psychiatry at Makerere University. Her current research is “A Comparative Study of the Clinical Features and Immunological Status of Primary Mania Vs Secondary Mania in HIV/AIDS Patients", funded by SIDA/ SAREC, of Sweden.
She received her medical degree from Makerere University in 1999, did her internship at Rubaga Hospital, and then worked at St. Joseph's Hospital and Butabika Psychiatric Hospital. In working with mentally ill patients she noticed many HIV related mental problems including Mood disorders hence her interest and research in them.
She is a member of the Uganda Psychiatric Association, Uganda Medical Association and East African Young Psychiatrists and Trainees Association. She is currently pursuing her Masters Degree in Psychiatry sponsored by the "Support to the Health Sector Strategic Plan Project", under the African Development Bank. Last year, she won the IBRO student travel grant to the 6th Neuroscience School and The Neurobiology of Epilepsy workshop in Grahamstown, South Africa.
Winning the Young Minds in Psychiatry Award helps her include a third arm of HIV positive patients without mood disorders to her research project and thus complete the tripartite comparative analysis.
She is married with two children.
Jose M. Goikolea, M.D.
Institution: Hospital Clinic, Barcelona Spain
C/Villaroel, 170
Barcelona 08036, Spain
Title of Winning Proposal: Fronto-Temporal White Matter Integrity in Mania and Psychosis
Jose M. Goikolea works as a psychiatrist at the Bipolar Disorders Program of the Hospital Clinic, at Barcelona, Spain. He attended Medical School at the University of the Basque Country in Spain where he graduated with honors. He completed residency in Psychiatry at the Hospital Clinic in Barcelona. During residency, he achieved the Prite Award as best 2nd year resident in Spain. On finishing residency he got involved with the Bipolar Disorders Program, headed by Dr. E. Vieta. Since then, he has combined a good deal of clinical work with research, mainly focused on novel treatments, both psychological (patient and family psychoeducation) and pharmacological, including atypical antipsychotics and novel antiepileptic drugs. He has co-authored 20 articles and several book chapters. Since 2004 he is leading a new project into his unit, on research on first episodes of bipolar disorder in order to get a better understanding of the pathophysiology of the illness and its relationship with psychosis and schizophrenia, as well as to deepen on early intervention and treatment.
United States/Bipolar Disorder Category:
Alexander B. Niculescu III, M.D., Ph.D.
Institution: Indiana University School of Medicine
791 Union Drive
Indianapolis, IN 46202-4887
Title of Winning Proposal: “PhenoChipping of psychotic disorders: phenotype to genotype integration”
Dr. Alexander B. Niculescu has been trained as both a clinician and a basic researcher, at Scripps Research Institute and UC San Diego, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Indiana University School of Medicine. He is interested in translational research approaches to understanding psychiatric disorders.
He has developed an approach, termed Convergent Functional Genomics (CFG), for identifying candidate genes, pathways and mechanisms for neuropsychiatric disorders. The approach is based on the integration of gene expression profiling in pharmacogenomic animal models of the illness with human genetic linkage studies and other lines of evidence. His lab has applied this approach to bipolar and related disorders, and is currently engaged in pursuing collaborative studies using this approach in schizophrenia and alcohol abuse. Dr. Niculescu is particularly interested in circadian clock genes as candidate genes for cycling and switching in bipolar disorders.
Another line of work in his lab involves the study of phenotypes- phenomics. The imprecise nature of psychiatric phenotypes has been a rate-limiting step for clinical research and practice in general, and for psychiatric genetics in particular. Dr. Niculescu is developing an approach, termed PhenoChipping, that applies microarray paradigms and methodology to the empirical study of phenotypes. He is particularly interested in building a bank of blood samples from the subjects that are PhenoChipped, for repeated mining by studies integrating genetic and genomics with phenomics.
International/Schizophrenia Category:
Stefan Leucht, M.D.
Institution: Klinikum rechts der Isar
Ismaningerstr. 22
81675 Muenchen
Germany
Title of Winning Proposal: The time course of antipsychotic drug effect.
After a brief excursion in law, Stefan Leucht studied medicine at the Ludwig-Maximilian University, Munich, and graduated in 1993. During these studies he was supported by a “Scholarship for the Highly Talented” by the Federal State of Bavaria. He received a doctor’s degree for an experimental study in the field of intensive care medicine in 1995. Since 1994 he has been practicing at the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy of the Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany. In 2002/2003 he spent a year as a research associate at the Zucker Hillside Hospital, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in New York. While the collaboration with the Zucker Hillside Hospital continues, he returned to the Technische Universität München in September 2003 where he was appointed assistant professor ("Privatdozent") in January 2005.
After initial contributions to the field of depression and Alzheimer's disease, Dr. Leucht's research focus switched to psychopharmacology and evidence-based medicine. He has published a number of respected meta-analyses on treatments for schizophrenia and also has a research interest in pharmacogenetics and medical decision making. He is one of the editors of the Cochrane Schizophrenia Group and has published as a first author in the American Journal of Psychiatry, the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, the Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology, the International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology, Lancet, Nervenarzt, Psychopharmacology, Schizophrenia Research and The Cochrane Library.
United States/Schizophrenia Category:
Raymond Y. Cho, M.D.
Institution: University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
3811 O'Hara St.
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Title of Winning Proposal: Impaired Context Processing and Prefrontal Cortical Gamma Synchrony in First-Episode Schizophrenia
Raymond Cho received his M.D. and M.Sc. in neuroscience from the University of Toronto, where he also completed a research fellowship at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry. He received his clinical psychiatry training at Western Psychiatric Clinic and Institute, University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Cho has continued there as an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and currently serves as the director of the STEP (Services for the Treatment of Early Psychosis) clinic.
His current research interests include the investigation of the basic mechanisms of cognitive control, asking such questions as how context influences the dynamics of online adjustments in task performance, and how these cognitive processes and associated neural mechanisms are impaired in schizophrenia. He employs a multimodal approach, including behavioral, ERP, fMRI and computational modeling methodologies. Dr. Cho has also published chapters on monitoring deficits in schizophrenia and the neurobiology of schizophrenia, and serves as an ad hoc reviewer for the Archives of General Psychiatry, American Journal of Psychiatry and Biological Psychiatry. Dr. Cho is the recipient of numerous awards including the APA Kempf Award, NIMH Outstanding Resident Award and the NARSAD Young Investigator Award.