image: BBRF Chairman Geoffrey A. Simon (far left) and BBRF President and CEO Dr. Jeffrey Borenstein (far right) with prizewinners Drs. Elizabeth V. Goldfarb, Christina K. Kim, Erin Gibson, and Juliet Beni Edgcomb at the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation 2024 Klerman & Freedman Awards Presentation on July 26, in New York City. (Prizewinner Hugo Tejeda was unable to attend.)
Credit: Chad David Kraus
The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF) today announced the winners of its 2024 Klerman and Freedman Prizes recognizing exceptional clinical and basic research in mental illness. The prizes are awarded annually to honor the work of outstanding scientists who have been supported by the Foundation’s Young Investigator Grants Program.
“The 2024 Klerman and Freedman prize winners are being recognized for their significant findings related to suicide prevention, PTSD, substance-use disorders, autism, brain biology, and therapeutic drug development,” said Jeffrey Borenstein, M.D., President and CEO of the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. “Their important work is advancing the development of diagnostic tools, the identification of effective and targeted treatments, and paving the way toward prevention of mental illness. We celebrate these scientists, and we thank our generous donors for supporting scientists in brain and behavior research.”
The prizewinners are selected by the BBRF Scientific Council comprised of 192 pre-eminent mental health researchers.
Since its founding in 1987, the Foundation has awarded more than $450 million to more than 5,400 scientists around the world. The Klerman and Freedman Prizes are named for Gerald Klerman, M.D., and Daniel Freedman, M.D., whose legacies as researchers, teachers, physicians, and administrators have indelibly influenced neuropsychiatry.
Five scientists received recognition for their outstanding work in brain and behavior research:
2024 Klerman Prize for Exceptional Clinical Research
Juliet Beni Edgcomb, M.D., Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles
Dr. Edgcomb seeks to develop a set of rules for clearly identifying children and adolescents with suicide-related symptoms from within complex electronic health record (EHR) data. This would be a significant step forward in suicide prevention. She has worked with an EHR “training set” that includes data from 400 children and adolescents, to identify those presenting to healthcare providers with suicidal thoughts and behaviors. The aim is to identify the predictive variables best defining each pertinent phenotype and to produce a predicted probability of each suicide-related phenotype for each child. She has recently expanded this research to develop and validate methods to detect suicide-related visits among 3,400 children.
2024 Freedman Prize for Exceptional Basic Research
Christina K. Kim, Ph.D., University of California, Davis
Dr. Kim seeks to develop new methodologies for recording and perturbing neuronal activity in animal models, specifically in brain regions implicated in neuropsychiatric diseases. Her lab engineers technologies to identify molecular biomarkers in neurons modulated by novel therapeutic drugs for treating depression and anxiety. She aims to determine which specific neurons and molecules can be targeted to improve disease symptoms. The hope is that an understanding of the targeted cellular mechanisms of therapeutic drugs in the brain can serve as the basis for designing modifications to these agents to increase their specificity and reduce their undesired side effects.
2024 Klerman Prize Honorable Mention
Elizabeth V. Goldfarb, Ph.D., Yale University
The goal of Dr. Goldfarb’s lab is to understand how stress changes the way we remember our lives and the consequences of these memories for later behavior. Her research takes a translational cognitive neuroscience approach that combines experimental tasks that measure different types of memories, analyses of brain responses using functional magnetic resonance imaging, and assessments of physiological responses and real-world behavior. The aim of her work is to identify memory markers of resilient responses to trauma and reveal targets for memory-related therapeutic interventions.
2024 Freedman Prize Honorable Mention
Erin Gibson, Ph.D., Stanford University
Dr. Gibson is studying the role of the circadian system in homeostatic processes, including neuroendocrine, immune, and neural stem-cell regulation. Dr. Gibson’s lab seeks greater understanding of how glial cells, among the non-neuronal cells of the brain, modulate neural circuits throughout development and in brain disorders, with a focus on the intersection between sleep and glial biology in disorders such as autism spectrum disorders, multiple sclerosis, and Alzheimer’s disease.
2024 Freedman Prize Honorable Mention
Hugo A. Tejeda, Ph.D., National Institute of Mental Health
Dr. Tejada’s research focuses on the role of neuromodulation in processing information in limbic neural circuits under physiological conditions in in psychiatric disorders. Areas of interest include understanding how neuropeptides in cortical circuits regulate circuit function to regulate threat appraisal and the role of dopamine in shaping motivation and reinforcement through actions in brain reward circuitry.
About the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation
The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation awards research grants to develop improved treatments, cures, and methods of prevention for mental illness. These illnesses include addiction, ADHD, anxiety, autism, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, depression, eating disorders, OCD, PTSD, and schizophrenia, as well as research on suicide prevention. Since 1987, the Foundation has awarded more than $450 million to fund more than 5,400 leading scientists around the world. 100% of every dollar donated for research is invested in research. BBRF operating expenses are covered by separate foundation grants. BBRF is the producer of the Emmy® nominated public television series Healthy Minds with Dr. Jeffrey Borenstein, which aims to remove the stigma of mental illness and demonstrate that with help, there is hope.