NIHThe National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has named psychiatrist Joshua Gordon of Columbia University Medical Center in New York City its next director. Gordon, who succeeds past NIMH Director Thomas Insel, who left the agency to join Google Life Sciences last September. Gordon is expected to take the reins from interim NIMH Director Bruce Cuthbert next month, according to a National Institutes of Health (NIH) announcement.
“Josh is a visionary psychiatrist and neuroscientist with deep experience in mental health research and practice,” NIH Director Francis Collins said in the statement. “He is exceptionally well qualified to lead the NIMH research agenda to improve mental health and treatments for mental illnesses.”
In addition to seeing patients at Columbia, Gordon also studies mouse models with psychiatric disease–associated mutations. “Josh is certainly coming from a basic science side,” Carrie Bearden, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Science. “He really cares about taking the findings in the animal models and looking how it’s really convergent with patient findings.”
