| Description: | You are invited to the next Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute Distinguished Lecture this week. Francine Benes, M.D., Ph.D. will deliver the public lecture this Thursday, Oct. 25, 2012 at 5:30 p.m. in VTC Room M106, preceded by a reception at 5 p.m. in the VTC cafe. Dr. Benes is the William P. and Henry B. Test Professor of Psychiatric Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School, the Director of the Program in Structural and Molecular Neuroscience and the Director of the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center at the Mclean Hospital.
Dr. Benes received her M.D. and Ph.D. from Yale School of Medicine, did postdoctoral training at the City of Hope National Medical Center and completed a residency in psychiatry at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Benes is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Science. She has received Shervert S. Frazier Lifetime Achievement Award, the William Silens Lifetime Achievement Award in Mentoring from Harvard Medical School, the Kempf Award for Research Mentoring from the American Psychiatric Association, an NIH MERIT Award and the Lieber Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Schizophrenia Research from NARSAD. Dr. Benes has also served on the editorial boards or been a section editor for a range of medical and scientific journals including: Biotechniques, Schizophrenia Bulletin, Development and Psychopathology, American Journal of Psychiatry, Neuropsychopharmacology, Schizophrenia Research, Current Opinion in Psychiatry, Neuroscience.Net and Clinical Schizophrenia and Related Psychoses.
Dr. Benes has devoted her career to the study of how the brain's circuitry is altered in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. She has used a combination of approaches to study the ways in which the brain's inhibitory neuron system (GABAergic interneurons) may be "mis-wired" within discrete portions of the brain's limbic lobe and developed a cellular circuitry model that postulates excessive excitatory inputs to inhibitory interneurons in schizophrenia. Although both patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder show dysfunction of GABAergic interneurons, each disorder shows a completely different pattern of abnormal gene expression within this network of inter-related genes. You can download a flyer with more information about this event at http://chsweb.carilion.com/jchs/documents/Benes%20Public%20Flyer.pdf. |
