Scientific Advisory Board

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. Kelsoe graduated from medical school at the University of Alabama, Birmingham in 1981. He completed internship training at Washington University in St. Louis and psychiatry residency at UCSD. He then went to the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland for 4 years and returned to San Diego to join the Department of Psychiatry faculty in 1989.

Dr. Kelsoe’s longstanding research focus has been the genetics of psychiatric illness, bipolar disorder in particular. Over the past 20 years, his work has been focused on using a variety of molecular genetic methods to identify the specific genes that predispose to bipolar disorder. He has pursued this primarily by using positional cloning methods such as linkage and association in families in which the illness is genetically transmitted. He has also employed animal models of bipolar disorder in order to identify possible candidate genes that can then be tested in clinical populations. This approach has led to the recent identification of the gene for G protein receptor kinase 3 (GRK3) as a likely gene for bipolar disorder on chromosome 22. Dr. Kelsoe is currently actively engaged in genome wide association studies of bipolar disorder. He directs the Bipolar Genome Study (BiGS) which is a 13-site consortium focused on identifying genes for bipolar disorder and their relationship to clinical symptoms. He also co-directs the Psychiatric GWAS Consortium for Bipolar Disorder (PGC-BD) which is an international collaborative effort designed to identify genes for bipolar disorder in a sample of over 10,000 patients. These large exciting new technological approaches promise great advances in understanding the causes of bipolar disorder.

Clinical Focus

Dr. Kelsoe’s primary clinical focus is the treatment of refractory mood disorders. He is the Medical Director of the STEP Clinic at the VA Hospital where they specialize in the treatment of chronic and refractory mood disorders. Patients at this clinic receive a thorough diagnostic evaluation and are eligible to participate in longitudinal research studies of the ability of genes to predict course, outcome, and treatment response.

Marion Leboyer, M.D., Ph.D. joined the faculty of the University of Paris in 1998 as Professor of Psychiatry. She is head of the university affiliated department of Psychiatry (Hospital Chenevier-Mondor, AP-HP) and runs a Psychiatry Genetics laboratory (INSERM). Dr. Leboyer’s research efforts have contributed to a better identification of relevant phenotype for genetic studies, particularly in the field of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, suicide, autism, OCD and pharmaco-genetic studies. Being principal investigator of national and international studies, she has been able to produce prominent findings such as identification in autism of the first mutations in neuroligins (NLGN-3 and NLGN-4). She is director of .a foundation (FondaMental) recently created by the French Ministry of Research aiming at creating a network of expert centers and promoting research in Psychiatry. Dr. Leboyer has authored or co-authored more than 200 scientific articles and book chapters, as well as 5 books.

Professor Gin S. Malhi is the Executive and Clinical director of the CADE Clinic based at Royal North Shore Hospital. He is Head of the Discipline of Psychiatry at the University of Sydney and is based at the Northern Clinical School. Gin is Head of the Department of Psychiatry at Royal North Shore Hospital and is a senior consultant psychiatrist in the Northern Sydney Central Coast Area Health Service.

Having obtained a degree in Pharmacology and a subsequent medical degree in the UK he completed his general psychiatry training in Cambridge and gained Membership of the United Kingdom Royal College of Psychiatrists in 1996. He then completed his specialist psychiatry training at the Bethlem and Maudsley Hospitals in London and as a Clinical Lecturer began mood disorders research at the Institute of Psychiatry (UK). Since moving to Australia in 1999 he has continued to conduct clinical research in depression and bipolar disorder and has been a Chief Investigator on a National Health Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Program Grant since 2003. During this time he has published more than 170 papers and has attracted research funding from the ARC and Rotary Foundation that he has used to investigate the neurobiology of Bipolar Disorder. In 2006 he was appointed the Editor-in-Chief of an international journal, Acta Neuropsychiatrica and he currently holds the post of Secretary in the Australasian Society of Bipolar Disorders (ASBD). In 2010 he was appointed the Editor of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry.