 | Dr. Benjamin S. Bunney |
A scientific symposium on the role of the neurotransmitter dopamine in schizophrenia will be held on Thursday, July 12, in honor of Dr. Benjamin S. Bunney, the Charles B.G. Murphy Professor of Psychiatry and professor of pharmacology and neurobiology.
Bunney, whose research group was the first to characterize the electrophysiology of nerve cells that use dopamine as their neurotransmitter, will retire from Yale this year after 38 years on the faculty, 20 as chair of the Department of Psychiatry. Known to friends and colleagues as "Steve," Bunney is one of the world's leading authorities on the dopamine system, which has been implicated in schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease and substance abuse disorders.
The symposium, "Dopamine System Regulation and Schizophrenia: Advancing the Link Between Neurobiology and the Clinic," will be held 8:30 a.m.-4:15 p.m. in the auditorium of the Yale School of Medicine's Anlyan Center for Medical Research and Education, 300 Cedar St. The conference will be followed by cocktails and dinner at the New Haven Lawn Club beginning at 6 p.m.
The symposium's nine speakers include Paul Greengard, the Vincent Astor Professor at the Rockefeller University, who was professor of pharmacology and psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine 1968-1983. In 2000, Greengard shared the Nobel Prize for his research on how dopamine and other transmitters exert their influence in the brain. Also speaking will be Bunney's brother Dr. William E. Bunney Jr., Distinguished Professor and Della Martin Chair of Psychiatry at the University of California-Irvine, and a top researcher in the molecular genetics and neurochemistry of mood disorders and schizophrenia.
Benjamin Bunney earned his M.D. at New York University (NYU) School of Medicine in 1964, completing his internship and internal medicine residency at the NYU division of Bellevue Hospital. He practiced internal medicine as a captain in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, and then completed a residency in psychiatry at Yale.
Shortly after joining the School of Medicine's psychiatry department as a faculty member in 1971, Bunney began a series of pioneering experiments. His initial experiments, carried out under the mentorship of Dr. George K. Aghajanian, the Foundations Fund Professor of Psychiatry, recorded for the first time the extracellular activity of dopamine cells in the brain. Bunney's laboratory then went on to conclusively identify these cells electrophysiologically using in vivo intracellular techniques and to characterize both their extra- and intracellular functioning.
In subsequent years, his laboratory made many fundamental contributions to scientists' understanding of the regulation of dopamine cells in the brain. In addition, his lab was the first to study the acute and chronic effects of antipsychotic drugs on the electrophysiological functioning of midbrain dopamine cell, studies that led to a neurophysiological model which differentiated the actions of typical and atypical antipsychotic medications. The work also lent support to the emerging concept that some of the brain's dopamine systems are hyperactive in schizophrenia, and ultimately, when combined with the work of others, led to a new generation of antipsychotic medications with greater efficacy and fewer side effects.
Bunney received the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology's (ACNP) highest research award, the Daniel H. Efron Award, and he was the first recipient of the Lieber Prize for outstanding achievement in research on mental illness from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD). He served as president of the ACNP in 1996, and he is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.
The symposium lectures are free and open to members of the Yale community. The registration fee for the complete program (which includes breakfast, lectures, lunch and dinner) is $150; $125 for the dinner only. For more information or to register online visit http://conferences.med.yale.edu and click on "Conference Schedule," or call (203) 785-4578.
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