The Brain Institute’s scientific director, Peter L. Strick, PhD, has been selected to receive  the 2018 American Psychosomatic Society’s Paul D. MacLean Award for Outstanding Neuroscience Research in Psychosomatic Medicine.  Strick, who also chairs the Department of Neurobiology, developed a unique transneuronal tracing technique that he now uses to study the neural bases of the brain-body connection.  Strick and his colleagues recently identified the neural networks that connect the cerebral cortex to the adrenal medulla, which is responsible for the body’s rapid response in stressful situations. These findings, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shed light on how stress, depression and other mental states can alter organ function, and show that there is a real anatomical basis for psychosomatic illness.

According to the American Psychosomatic Society, “Paul MacLean was a physician whose visionary neuroscientific research career at Yale Medical School and the National Institute of Mental Health was inspired by his recognition of the importance of emotion in clinical medicine and everyday life. In 1949 he hypothesized that psychosomatic disorders arose from impairment in communication between the limbic system and neocortex. This award is intended to honor Dr. MacLean and promote the line of research that he created on emotion, the brain and physical disease.”

Recent award recipients include Helen Mayberg, MD, at Emory University and Emeran A. Mayer, MD, at University of California-Los Angeles.