United States / Schizophrenia Category
Title of the Winning Proposal: Adolescent Development Trajectory of Prefrontal Synaptic Spine Density in Rat Models of Schizophrenia
Dr. R. Andrew Chambers is a 1991 graduate of Centre College, Danville, Kentucky, where he majored in chemical physics. He earned his medical degree at Duke University (1996).
There, he spent a year working in Dr. Ed Levin’s lab learning basic behavioral neuroscience and studying
nicotine effects in an animal model of schizophrenia, involving techniques taught to him by Dr. Barbara Lipska at the National Institutes of Mental Health.
Dr. Chambers went on to residency and fellowship training in psychiatry and translational neuroscience at Yale University (2002), where under the mentorship of Dr. David Self, he worked to characterize a neurodevelopmental animal model of substance disorder vulnerability schizophrenia. As of 2003, Dr. Chambers is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Indiana University School of Medicine, and Director of the Laboratory for Translational Research of Dual Diagnosis Disorders. This research program, supported by a Career Award from the National Institute of Drug Abuse, focuses on exploring the neural mechanisms underlying substance disorder vulnerability across differential forms of mental illness, and the role of adolescent neurodevelopment in these processes.
His APA/AstraZeneca Young Minds Award will support investigations on the adolescent-age developmental trajectory of frontal cortical neuronal morphology in animal models of schizophrenia.
