The National Institute of Mental Health has granted a $15 million Silvio Conte Center Grant to Dr. Tallie Baram, a professor of pediatrics, neurology, and anatomy and neurobiology at the University of California-Irvine, for her research in early childhood psychiatric screening.
Baram will receive the grant funds over the course of the next five years.
The research consists of studying how the effects of unpredictable environmental and parental “signals” can influence an infant later in life, and whether these instances contribute to mental health disorders.
Some of the problem behaviors that develop later in life that are being studied include cognitive and emotional problems, risky behaviors, addiction, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
“The complexity of teasing out the relative contribution of genetics and environment and identifying new parameters … requires a multi-interdisciplinary approach that involves both human and animal research,” Baram said in a public statement.
“Investigators at UCI have identified novel and surprising contributors of vulnerability to mental illness,” which is important because the NIMH now “recognizes that most neuropsychiatric disorders originate early in life,” Baram said. Such mental health disorders “are influenced by early-life environments in addition to important genetic factors.”
Chapman Too, Others
UCI’s Conte Center will coordinate its research with University of California-San Diego, Chapman University, and the University of Denver.
Together with emerging technologies that combine neurobiological research with the molecular research of animals, behavioral research with children, and neuroimaging and computational statistical analysis, they’ll study how brain circuit development and vulnerability to mental illness arises.
Baram received $10 million from the NIMH in 2013; she is also an internationally renowned child neurologist and neuroscientist.
