This Mid-Career Investigator Award in Patient-Oriented Research will permit the Principal Investigator to expand his mentorship, career development, and research on the integration of patient-oriented psychiatric genetics and neuroscience. The Principal Investigator is an established clinician-scientist in psychiatric genetics and clinical research. This application includes three components: 1) a mentoring plan designed to enhance the Principal Investigator's ability to mentor young investigators in psychiatric genetics and neuroscience; 2) a career development plan designed to expand the Principal Investigator's expertise in the integration of genetics and neuroimaging; and 3) a research plan that leverages the Principal Investigator's existing investigations on the genetic, behavioral and neural basis of psychiatric disorders and their relationship to normal variation in brain structure and function. The Principal Investigator has a substantial track record of mentoring and cultivating trainees and junior faculty in the area of genetic, clinical and epidemiologic research. This award would provide protected time for the Principal Investigator to expand and enhance these efforts. The mentoring plan capitalizes on his current mentoring activities and numerous collaborative research projects to develop a career development path for a new generation of investigators capable of integrating cutting-edge methods at the interface of patient-oriented genetics and neuroscience. Mentees will gain hands-on experience in patient-oriented research and will develop their own independent research directions. The clinical and translational research resources at MGH and the broader Harvard Medical School community will provide a rich training environment for mentees. The new research component of the application will include genomewide analyses of brain phenotypes to examine the genetic and neural architecture of anxiety disorders. This application was designed to address objectives identified by NIMH's Strategic Plan to fuel research on the causes of mental disorders and the National Advisory Mental Health Council Workgroup on Research Training to expand mentoring of young investigators capable of conducting the interdisciplinary research needed to achieve those objectives.
Recent advances in genetics and neuroscience have created unprecedented opportunities to unravel the causes of mental illness and ameliorate the public health burden and suffering they incur. This application for a Midcareer Investigator Award in Patient-Oriented Research will allow Dr. Jordan Smoller to enhance his research and mentorship of young scientists to bring together genetics and brain imaging in the service of discovering the causes of mental illness.
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