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Dr. Stanley J. Watson, Ph.D., M.D.
Stanley Watson is currently co-Director and Senior Research Scientist at the Mental Health Research Institute at the University of Michigan and the Theophile Raphael Professor of Neurosciences in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Michigan Medical School. After receiving his undergraduate degree from the University of Southern Mississippi, Dr. Watson obtained a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Iowa where he gained experience in experimental clinical psychopathology. He received the M.D. degree from Tulane Medical School and completed a residency in Psychiatry at Stanford Medical School. During his medical school and residency training, he actively maintained a research program that served as the basis of a career long dedication to understanding brain circuitry and its relevance to psychiatric disorders.
When Dr. Watson began his research career, the more descriptive study of brain anatomy was just beginning to interface with the study of the molecules that participate in neurotransmission. Dr. Watson’s work played a critical role in the synthesis of neuroanatomy and neurochemistry—the creation of functional neuroanatomy. This has since become the classic way that much of basic neuroscience research is conducted—studying neuronal communication in an anatomical context. Dr. Watson has spent much of his career generating fundamental tools and strategies that allow increasingly more sophisticated approaches to the study of brain function in well defined circuits. He pioneered the use of these novel tools and described how specific neurotransmitter systems are laid out, how they are regulated and how they participate in emotional and motivated behavior. He has extended this basic work to the study of the human brain and its dysfunction in mental illness.
His laboratory focused first on the anatomy of endorphins, the endogenous opioid peptides in brain. Over the years, his research group generated the classic maps that have localized the opioid peptide families and their multiple receptors This proved critical to understanding circuits involved in pain control, emotional tone and reward behavior in mammals including humans. However, Dr. Watson took functional neuroanatomy beyond mapping to the study of regulation. In collaboration with Dr. James Roberts, he developed the technique of in situ hybridization for studying changes in gene expression in the brain, allowing one to investigate how behavior altered the expression of specific genes in specific brain circuits.
Dr. Watson, in collaboration with Dr. Huda Akil, has used these tools coupled with other molecular and biochemical approaches to investigate the fundamental mechanisms underlying the biology of stress and of substance abuse. They have extended these approaches to the study of human emotions and particularly to understand the biological basis of severe mood disorders, including major depression. They have helped establish two national collaborative systems, the Pritzker Network and later the Pritzker Neuropsychiatric Disorders Research Consortium that uses fundamental neurobiological strategies to uncover the genetic and neuronal basis of major depression, bipolar disease and schizophrenia. Dr. Watson’s recent efforts have focused on using information from the Human Genome Project and the tools of microarray technology (Gene Chips) to uncover the genetic and biological causes of major psychiatric disorders.
This body of work has earned Dr. Watson national and international recognition. The fact that he is a psychiatrist who is also a leading neuroscientist gives him a unique perspective on the field. Thus, he has played a critical role at the national level in chairing the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Institute on Mental Health (NIMH) and in chairing the review of the intramural program at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). He also co-chaired a highly publicized Institute of Medicine (IOM) report on the potential medical uses of marijuana. He served on the council of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, has chaired the Program Committee for the Society for Neuroscience, and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He has been invited to deliver a number of named lectures, including the Yale Flynn Lecture and the Pfizer Visiting Professorship in Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins (1994). He has received the A.P. Giannini Award, 1977, the McAlpin Award in 1980, and was the co-recipient (with Dr. Huda Akil ) of the Pasarow Award for 1994. In 1994, he was elected to the membership of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academy of Sciences.
Last Update: 1-6-11
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