The objective of this grant is to develop and teach a new course in the neurobiology of disease at Brandeis University. The course will be offered to predoctoral trainees in the Brandeis Neuroscience training program and to other members of the Brandeis neuroscience community. The course will bring together faculty from five Brandeis University departments as well as clinicians and clinician-scientists from Boston area hospitals and medical schools. It will consist of lectures from Brandeis and outside faculty, student discussion of primary biomedical literature, attendance at Grand Rounds Conferences at nearby hospitals, small group meetings with clinical mentors, and small group research projects aimed at elucidating potentially fruitful approaches to key remaining problems in the pathobiology of particular diseases or sets of diseases. These projects and the outside lectures will be made available to the broader community via a course web site. If our training mission is successful, it will contribute to the education of a new generation of basic neuroscientists more comfortable with the facts, concepts and terminology of neurological and psychiatric medicine and allied fields. Such training is likely to better equip tomorrow's researchers to quickly identify key clinically relevant basic scientific problems that require solution for improved diagnosis and treatment of neurological and psychiatric diseases such as schizophrenia, depression, Alzheimer's Disease, Parkinson's Disease, Huntington's Disease, mental retardation, autism, and epilepsy. Improved dialogue and communication between basic scientists and clinicians is likely to contribute to more rapidly moving advances at the bench back into the clinic. ? ?
