Yale University: Yale Creates Center Devoted to Brain and Mind Health
Yale School of Medicine has announced the creation of the Yale Center for Brain and Mind Health (CBMH) to promote interdisciplinary clinical and translational research on conditions that affect the mind and brain. The center will foster transformational work that bridges existing departments, levels of analysis, and disciplinary boundaries, and will focus on areas of clinical and translational neuroscience that are broader than any single disease.
The vision for the CBMH emanated from a Clinical Translational Neuroscience retreat held in November 2021 and attended by more than 150 faculty and other leaders from across the university and the Yale New Haven Health System. The center will be directed by a group of clinical and translational neuroscientists from several relevant departments. The initial directors will be Eyiyemisi Damisah, MD, assistant professor of neurosurgery and of neuroscience; James McPartland, PhD, Harris Professor in the Yale Child Study Center; Christopher Pittenger, MD, PhD, Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor of Psychiatry; Kevin Sheth, MD, professor of neurology and of neurosurgery; and Serena Spudich, MD, Gilbert H. Glaser Professor of Neurology.
The CBMH will bring together existing expertise within Yale and the hospital community and will recruit new faculty in research areas that build on Yale’s strengths. In addition, it will provide grant funding and educational initiatives. CBMH internal pilot grants will support synergies among researchers in clinical and translational neuroscience, elevating collaboration and cross-disciplinary science. This grant program will emphasize novel collaborations involving multiple principal investigators, interdisciplinary work, and a focus on investigations intended to directly impact patients.
Focus areas will align with and build upon existing strengths throughout the university, including those in the School of Public Health, the expanding School of Engineering and Applied Science, the School of Nursing, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the medical school’s own center that promotes and performs top-level clinical and translational research, the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation.
The CBMH also will seek to enhance research collaboration between the School of Medicine and allied partner health care systems, including the Yale New Haven Health System, the VA Connecticut Healthcare System, and the Connecticut Mental Health Center. The strength of these organizations will provide a synergistic opportunity for improving patient care.