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John Huguenard, PhD, associate professor of neurology and neurological sciences, received the Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award. The awards, which are administered by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, honor the late Sen. Jacob Javits who for several years was a victim of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. Huguenard received the award for his project titled “Inhibitory Controls in the Thalamic Reticular Nucleus.” His lab studies a part of the brain called the thalamic reticular nucleus. The output of this nucleus is mainly inhibitory, yet under certain pathological conditions it can paradoxically generate excessive neuronal activity and epileptic seizures. This project will determine the pathophysiological conditions under which seizure generation occurs.
Olivera Mitrasinovic, PhD, science research associate in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, received a New Investigator grant in May from the Alzheimer’s Association, the largest private funder of Alzheimer’s research. Mitrasinovic won the award for her proposed study “Accelerated clearance of amyloid-beta peptide and amyloid-beta plaques. ” Her work seeks to better understand the signaling pathways in the sequence of events in specialized brain cells, called microglia, with the aim of accelerating elimination of beta-amyloid without triggering inflammation and possibly offering a novel approach to treating Alzheimer’s disease. She joined Stanford in 1997 as a postdoctoral fellow in genetics and now works in the lab of associate professor of psychiatry Greer M. Murphy Jr., MD, PhD.
Shreyas Vasanawala, MD, PhD, received the President’s Award of the American Roentgen Ray Society. He won the award for his paper, “Rapid Musculoskeletal MR Imaging with Phase-Sensitive Steady State Free Precession.” Vasanawala, a resident in radiology, earned both his medical degree and his doctorate in biophysics at the medical school. The radiology award was presented in May at the 104th annual meeting of the ARRS in Miami Beach, Fla.
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