Université Paris-Saclay to host the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health of the United States
On Thursday, May 11, Université Paris-Saclay will welcome Joshua A. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health), as part of a day of conferences on mental health research held at the University’s Faculty of Pharmacy and Faculty of Medicine.
Through a series of conferences and round-table discussions, the day-long event will bring together leading French and American experts in the fields of psychiatry and mental health, offering an exciting opportunity to share research results and perspectives from both sides of the Atlantic. In addition to Dr. Gordon, Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, the event will also be attended by the Deans of the Université Paris-Saclay Faculty of Pharmacy, Prof. Marc Pallardy, and the Faculty of Medicine, Prof. Marc Humbert.
In the morning, a series of talks and conferences will take place at the Faculty of Pharmacy in Orsay, with an introduction by Prof. Didier Samuel, Director of the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm), and former Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Université Paris-Saclay. The morning’s conference will be given by Dr. Gordon on “Exploring the role of hippocampal-prefrontal synchrony in behavior”, followed by round-table discussions led by experts in neuroscience and psychiatry linked to the University’s ecosystem of laboratories and research partners.
The day will continue with an afternoon at the University’s Faculty of Medicine at Kremlin-Bicêtre where Dr. Gordon will give a conference on “Challenges and Opportunities in Mental Health Research”, and a round-table discussion will explore how to build bridges in US-France mental health research.
Read the full program and find the list of speakers here.
About Joshua A. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D.
Dr. Gordon has served as Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) since 2016. Dr. Gordon earned his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, San Francisco, and completed a Psychiatry residency at Columbia University, where he served on the faculty from 2004 until he left to join NIMH.
Dr. Gordon’s research employs an integrative systems approach towards understanding the neurobiology underlying working memory and its disruption by genes of relevance to schizophrenia, demonstrating the role of neural dynamics in neural communication and describing how genetic variance confers risk for disease by altering these dynamics.
Dr. Gordon is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. His work has been recognized by the Rising Star Award from the International Mental Health Research Organization, the A.E. Bennett Award from the Society of Biological Psychiatry, and the Daniel H. Efron Research Award from the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology.
The National Institute of Mental Health is the lead federal agency in the United States for research on mental disorders, and works to transform the understanding and treatment of mental illnesses through basic and clinical research, paving the way for prevention, recovery and cure.