Second Meeting of the DS-I Africa Consortium
29 October -2 November 2022

Dr Joshua Gordon (Participant)

Joshua A. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., has served as the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) since 2016. In this role, Dr. Gordon oversees a broad research portfolio of basic and clinical research aimed at paving the way for prevention, recovery, and cure of mental illnesses. Prior to joining NIMH, Dr. Gordon was on the faculty at Columbia University, where he conducted research, taught students and residents, and maintained a general psychiatry practice. Dr. Gordon received M.D. and Ph.D. degrees in neuroscience from the University of California, San Francisco, and completed a psychiatry residency and research fellowship at Columbia University prior to joining the faculty in 2004. 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. Utilizing a range of modern neuroscience techniques, including in vivo neurophysiology and optical and pharmacological circuit manipulation, his lab has demonstrated a crucial role for oscillatory neural dynamics in the long-range functional connectivity in the hippocampal-prefrontal circuit in rodents. Through studying mice carrying mutations that, in humans, confer risk for schizophrenia, he has developed and tested causal hypotheses for how genetic variants confer risk for disease. By disrupting these processes and then testing pharmacological and neuromodulatory approaches to reversing this disruption, his work has laid the groundwork for potential translation. Dr. Gordon is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. His work has been recognized by several prestigious awards, including the NARSAD Young Investigator Award from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation