Yale Bulletin
and Calendar

November 2-9, 1998Volume 27, Number 11


























Nestler and Shaywitz have been elected to Institute of Medicine

Two School of Medicine faculty members -- Drs. Eric J. Nestler and Sally E. Shaywitz -- have been elected to the prestigious Institute of Medicine (IOM). They were chosen for their major contributions to health and medicine, and will devote a significant amount of volunteer time to IOM committees engaged in a broad range of studies on health policy issues.

Dr. Eric J. Nestler. The Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor of Psychiatry, Pharmacology and Neurobiology, Nestler is working to improve understanding about the ways in which the brain responds to repeated perturbations under normal and pathological conditions. A major focus of his research is drug addiction. He seeks both to identify the molecular changes that drugs produce in the brain to cause addiction, and to characterize the genetic and environmental factors that determine the drugs' ability to produce these changes in specific individuals. This work is based on the view that a greater knowledge of the neurobiological basis of drug addiction will lead to more effective treatments and preventive measures. Similar work is underway in the areas of depression, psychosis and stress.

Nestler holds a B.A., Ph.D. and M.D. from Yale. He joined the Yale faculty in 1987. Since 1992, he has served as director of the Abraham Ribicoff Research Facilities and of the division of molecular psychiatry.

Dr. Sally Shaywitz. Professor of pediatrics, Shaywitz has a special interest in the development of learning from early childhood through adulthood, and in the neurobiology of reading. She has studied learning, and particularly reading, from a broad perspective. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, she and her research group discovered sex differences in the functional organization of the brain for language. They also uncovered differences between dyslexic and nonimpaired readers in the neural circuitry of the brain for reading. She is currently examining how sex hormones influence cognitive functioning in postmenopausal women.

Shaywitz is the principal investigator of the Connecticut Longitudinal Study, a study of the reading development of school children who have been followed since kindergarten. She joined the Yale faculty in 1979 as founder and director of the Learning Disorders Unit in the department of pediatrics, and codirects the Yale Center for the Study of Learning and Attention with her husband, Dr. Bennett A. Shaywitz.