The world’s largest center for studying mental illness—the in-house research program of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md.—is undergoing a major reorganization and expansion of research on mood and anxiety disorders.

The improvements were recommended a few years ago by a panel of outside experts convened to assess the quality of the NIMH’s Division of Intramural Research Programs. They include the creation of new labs and the recruitment of heavyweight psychiatric researchers from outside NIMH to head up various operations within it.

"This infusion of fresh talent," said NIMH Director Steven Hyman, M.D., "will help us translate advances in the science of emotion into better treatments and maybe even preventive interventions for mood and anxiety disorders."

Here is some of the fresh outside talent that has been recruited by NIMH:

• Dennis Charney, M.D., has been appointed director of the new Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program within NIMH’s Division of Intramural Research Programs. This program, inaugurated on September 14, will ultimately encompass nine clinical branches, freestanding sections, and basic laboratories, many of them new.

Before accepting this appointment, Charney was a professor of psychiatry and director of psychiatric research at Yale University. He is known for his studies on the neurobiology and drug treatment of depression, schizophrenia, panic disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder. Charney will also serve as chief of the new Experimental Therapeutics and Pathophysiology Branch within the new Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program.

• Daniel Pine, M.D., a child psychiatrist from Columbia University, will head the Section on Development and Affective Neuroscience within the new Experimental Therapeutics and Pathophysiology Branch. The section will employ neuroimaging and neuroendocrine methodologies to study childhood depression and anxiety disorders. One of the key questions to be addressed is whether childhood depression, like childhood-onset diabetes, is fundamentally different from the adult-onset form.

• Kathleen Merikangas, Ph.D., a leading psychiatric geneticist/epidemiologist, will become chief of the Experimental Therapeutics and Pathophysiology Branch’s Section on Developmental Genetic Epidemiology. She will search for biological markers in children of families at risk for developing mood disorders. Identification of such markers and underlying genes could lead to the development of new preventives. Merikangas comes to NIMH from Yale University.

• Christian Grillon, Ph.D., is still another Yale scientist recruited by NIMH to revitalize its in-house research operation. He will be joining the Experimental Therapeutics and Pathophysiology Branch and will conduct psychophysiological studies on startle reflex and fear conditioning in anxiety disorders.

• Husseini Manji, M.D., returns to the NIMH’s intramural research operation after six years at Wayne State University’s psychiatry department. He will become chief of a new Laboratory of Molecular Pathophysiology and will follow up leads on abnormalities in nerve signal transduction in bipolar disorder and the therapeutic potential of the anticancer drug tamoxifen in treating refractory mania.

• Robert Innis, M.D., Ph.D., previously a Yale psychiatry professor and a brain imaging expert, will serve as chief of the new Molecular Imaging Branch. Known for pioneering PET studies of neuronal receptors in psychiatric disorders, he will mount a major upgrade of NIMH’s functional brain imaging and nuclear medicine capabilities.

• Wayne Drevets, M.D., a psychiatry and brain-imaging researcher from the University of Pittsburgh, will be chief of the Section on Neuroimaging of the new Molecular Imaging Branch. He will use PET and MRI, both structural and functional, to study depression and bipolar disorder. The section will follow up on preliminary evidence of neuron loss in depression.