The US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has a new director. On September 12, psychiatrist Joshua Gordon took the reins at the institute, which has a budget of US$1.5 billion. He previously researched how genes predispose people to psychiatric illnesses by acting on neural circuits, at Columbia University in New York. His predecessor, Thomas Insel, left the NIMH to join Verily Life Sciences, a start-up owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, in 2015. Gordon says that his priorities at the NIMH will include “low-hanging clinical fruit, neural circuits and mathematics—lots of mathematics", and explains to Nature exactly what that means.
What do you plan to achieve in your first year in office?
I won’t be doing anything radical. I am just going to listen to and learn from all the stakeholders—the scientific community, the public, consumer advocacy groups and other government offices.
But I can say two general things. In the past twenty years, my two predecessors, Steve Hyman [now director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts] and Tom Insel, embedded into the NIMH the idea that psychiatric disorders are disorders of the brain, and to make progress in treating them we really have to understand the brain. I will absolutely continue this legacy. This does not mean we are ignoring the important roles of the environment and social interactions in mental health—we know they have a fundamental impact. But that impact is on the brain. Second, I will be thinking about how NIMH research can be structured to give pay-outs in the short-, medium- and long-terms.
How has neuroscience changed since you completed your residency in 2001?
The advent of incredibly powerful tools to observe and alter activity in a subset of neurons, such as optogenetics, has been transformational. It is allowing us to get at questions of how neural circuits produce behaviour—a research approach that may soon generate new treatments for psychiatric disorders.
[For more of this story, written by Alison Abbott, go to https://www.scientificamerican...s-about-mathematics/]
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