The American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP) has named David Glahn, Ph.D., Professor of psychiatry and Co-Director of the Division on Neurocognition, Neurocomputation and Neurogenetics at Yale University School of Medicine as the winner of the Joel Elkes Research Award. This award, presented at the 55th Annual Meeting of the ACNP in Hollywood, Florida, is in recognition of an outstanding clinical contribution to neuropsychopharmacology. In nominating Dr. Glahn for the award, Dr. John Krystal, Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Yale, called him a "strikingly original and productive scientist", a "dynamic teacher", and "an outstanding mentor".
Dr. Glahn has published over 200 papers and reviews in leading scientific journals, leads a number of research grants funded by the National Institutes of Health, and has played a seminal role in building and leading imaging-genomics consortia to advance the analytic methods for the enormous datasets involved in whole genome sequencing. The power of Dr. Glahn's approach is that he uses function to search for structure. That is, he utilizes his deep knowledge of cognitive neuroscience to nominate potential biomarkers, which can then be studied in large pedigree cohorts to assess heritability, reveal disease associations, and identify putative risk genes. This approach helps to ensure that identified risk genes are likely to have a meaningful impact on the daily functioning of the individual, eliminating the need to conduct a post-hoc search to ascribe function. In addition, Dr. Glahn served as a Section Editor for Human Brain Mapping and currently serves on the editorial board of three other professional journals. He is a Fellow in the ACNP, and has been the recipient of a number of other professional honors, including the A. E. Bennett Award of the Society of Biological Psychiatry.
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Media contact: Erin Colladay at ecolladay@acnp.org; 615-649-3074
ACNP, founded in 1961, is a professional organization of more than 1000 leading scientists, including four Nobel Laureates. The mission of ACNP is to further research and education in neuropsychopharmacology and related fields in the following ways: promoting the interaction of a broad range of scientific disciplines of brain and behavior in order to advance the understanding of prevention and treatment of disease of the nervous system including psychiatric, neurological, behavioral and addictive disorders; encouraging scientists to enter research careers in fields related to these disorders and their treatment; and ensuring the dissemination of relevant scientific advances.