Scientific Advisory Board

John C. Reed, MD, Ph.D., is President & Chief Executive Officer of Burnham Institute for Medical Research, where he has worked as scientist and leader for over 15 years. Dr. Reed is also Professor and Donald Bren Presidential Chair at Burnham, with adjunct Professor appointments at several universities. Dr. Reed’s scientific accomplishments include authorship of over 725 research publications and more than 50 book chapters. He was recognized as the world’s most highly cited scientist for his research publications during the decade 1995-2005 in the broad field of “cell biology” and also in the field of “general biomedicine” by the Institute for Scientific Information. Dr. Reed is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, and has been awarded over 70 research grants for his work. He is a named inventor for over 80 patents and the founder or co-founder of five biotechnology companies. Dr. Reed has served as an advisor to numerous biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, and has also served on the Boards of Directors of several public and private biotechnology companies and life-sciences organizations.

Dr. Deisseroth focuses on developing molecular and cellular tools to observe, perturb, and re-engineer brain circuits. His laboratory is based in the James H. Clark Center at Stanford and employs a range of techniques including neural stem cell and tissue engineering methods, electrophysiology, molecular biology, neural activity imaging, animal behavior, and computational neural network modeling. Also a clinician in the psychiatry department, Professor Deisseroth employs novel electromagnetic brain stimulation techniques in human patients for therapeutic purposes.

Deisseroth focuses on developing molecular and cellular tools to observe, perturb, and re-engineer brain circuits. His laboratory is based in the James H. Clark Center at Stanford and employs a range of techniques including neural stem cell and tissue engineering methods, electrophysiology, molecular biology, neural activity imaging, animal behavior, and computational neural network modeling. Also a clinician in the psychiatry department, Professor Deisseroth employs novel electromagnetic brain stimulation techniques in human patients for therapeutic purposes.

Dr. Jamison did her undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles where she was a National Science Foundation Research Fellow, University of California Cook Scholar, John F. Kennedy Scholar, United States Public Health Service Pre-doctoral Research Fellow, and UCLA Graduate Woman of the Year. She also studied zoology and neurophysiology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
 
Dr. Jamison, formerly the director of the UCLA Affective Disorders Clinic, was selected at UCLA Woman of Science and has been cited as one of the “Best Doctors in the United States.” She is recipient of the American Suicide Foundation Research Award, the UCLA Distinguished Alumnus Award, the UCLA Award for Creative Excellence, the Siena Medal, the Endowment Award from the Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, the Fawcett Humanitarian Award from the National Depressive and Manic-Depressive Association, the Steven V. Logan Award for Research into Brain Disorders from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, the William Styron Award from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, and the Yale University McGovern Award for excellence in medical communication. She was selected as one of five individuals for the public television series “Great Minds of Medicine,” and chosen by Time magazine as a “Hero of Medicine.” She will be the Litchfield Lecturer at the University of Oxford in 2002.
 
Dr. Jamison was a member of the first National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research. She is Senior Scientific Consultant to the Dana Foundation and Chair of the Genome Action Coalition, an alliance of more than 140 patient groups, pharmaceutical corporations, and biotechnology companies. She also serves on the National Committee for Basic Sciences at UCLA, and is the executive producer and writer for a series of award-winning public television specials about manic-depressive illness and the arts.

Dr. Robert C. Malenka is the Pritzker Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Director of the Pritzker Laboratory at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He has been a world leader in the molecular mechanisms of how neurons communicate with one another and how this communication is modified during learning and by experience.  Dr. Malenka received his undergraduate education at Harvard from which he graduated in 1978, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in biology. He did all of his graduate work at the Stanford University School of Medicine from which he received an M.D. and a Ph.D. in neuroscience in 1983. Over the ensuing years he completed residency training in psychiatry at Stanford and 4 years of postdoctoral research work with Roger Nicoll at the University of California, San Francisco (U.C.S.F.). In 1989, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Physiology at U.C.S.F. at which he reached the rank of Full Professor in 1996.  In addition to running an active research program at U.C.S.F., he was the Director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Addiction and Associate Director of the Center for Neurobiology and Psychiatry. He returned to the Stanford University School of Medicine in March, 1999 to become the Director of the Pritzker Laboratory in the Dept. of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science.  He is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences (2004) and an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2005). His public service includes serving on the National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse and as a Councilor for the Society for Neuroscience. He is also on the editorial boards of many prominent journals including Neuron, Trends in Neuroscience and the American Journal of Psychiatry.  Dr. Malenka’s research findings have been published in over 170 research papers in leading science journals. He has also co-authored a textbook entitled Molecular Neuropharmacology: A Foundation for Clinical Neuroscience (McGraw Hill, 2001).

Associate Director, Depression Clinical and Research Program, Massachusetts General Hospital
Medical Director, Bipolar Research Program, Massachusetts General Hospital
Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

Dr. Nierenberg is a graduate of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, Bronx, NewYork. He did his residency in psychiatry at New York University/Bellevue Hospital in New York City. He then went on to become a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at Yale University, studying clinical epidemiology. He continued his trek north to join the faculty at Harvard, first to direct one of the Affective Disorders Inpatient Units and then to direct the Affective Disorders Outpatient Unit at McLean Hospital in Belmont MA. Dr. Nierenberg then joined the Psychiatry Department at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston where he is currently Associate Director of the Depression Clinical and Research Program and Medical Director of the Bipolar Programs, as well as Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Having published over 150 original articles, chapters, reviews, and abstracts, Dr. Nierenberg has been listed among the best doctors in North America for the treatment of mood and anxiety disorders since 1994. In 2000, he was awarded the NDMDA Gerald L. Klerman Young Investigator Award and a NARSAD Independent Investigator Award. Dr. Nierenberg is currently involved in both the Systematic Treatment Enhancement Program for Bipolar Disorder (STEP-BD) and the Sequential Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression (STAR*D) NIMH contracts, two unprecedented clinical trials that will include thousands of patients with mood disorders. He is also the Principal Invesitigator for a 3-site NIMH /NCCAM study of St.John’s Wort for Minor Depression. This has led to his appointment as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Bernard Osher Center for Complementary and Integrative Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

His primary interests are treatment resistant depression, bipolar depression, juvenile bipolar disorder, and the longitudinal course of affective disorders. Dr. Nierenberg lectures extensively, both nationally and internationally, teaches, maintains an active clinical practice, conducts clinical trials funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and industry, is a member of the NIMH Initial Review Group for Intervention Research and peer reviews studies for multiple psychiatric journals.