This Mentored Scientist Development Award for New Minority Faculty (MSDA/NMF) outlines a program of research to study neurodevelopmental factors in the pathogenesis of bipolar disorder (BP). The candidate, Dr. Laura E. Sanchez, is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry who is board certified in both Adult and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and has completed an NIMH sponsored fellowship in child psychopharmacology. The University of Pennsylvania and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia are well known for excellence in academic training and research in Psychiatry, Development, and Neuroscience. Dr. Tyrone Cannon, an established developmental psychologist with expertise in combining epidemiologic and high risk designs with neuroimaging techniques in the study of schizophrenia, will serve as Mentor. Dr. Cannon is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry and P.I. of the Genetics and Neurodevelopmental Core of the Mental Health Clinical Research Center on Regional Brain Function in Schizophrenia at the University of Pennsylvania. The two studies proposed in this application attempt to begin to test a neurodevelopmental model for BP. The first study takes an epidemiologic approach and examines the contributions of prospectively-assessed prenatal and perinatal complications and indices of neuropsychological deviance during early childhood to the prediction of adult BP I disorder in a birth cohort studied as part of the National Collaborative Perinatal Project (NCPP). The second study employs modern neuroimaging techniques in a follow-up study of sibling-pairs discordant for BP I who participated in the NCPP as infants and children; it examines the contributions of prospectively-assessed obstetric complications (OCs) to the prediction of neurocognitive and structural deficits in adult patients with BP I disorder. The academic plan focuses on broadening the candidate's knowledge base with regard to research design, data analysis of longitudinal data sets, neuroimaging and developmental neurobiology. Both the academic and research plans are designed to facilitate the transition of the candidate to independent investigator. The candidate's long term goal is to conduct interdisciplinary research aimed at examining the role that developmental dysfunction in fronto-subcortical neural networks mediating emotional processes may play in the pathogenesis of affective illness and the genetic and non-genetic processes that might contribute to such disturbances.
