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BY JOYCE THOMAS Robert C. Malenka, MD, PhD, has been named the new Nancy Friend Pritzker Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences effective May 1, 1999. Malenka, who received both his PhD in neurosciences and his medical degree in 1983 at Stanford, joined the medical faculty this year after a decade on the faculty at UCSF, where he directed the Center for the Neurobiology of Addiction and served as associate director of the Center for Neurobiology and Psychiatry. Malenka's work focuses on how nerve cells in the brain communicate and how these communication systems are modified over time when exposed to positive or negative stimuli. His research, involving studies of the cellular and molecular changes that take place in specific neural circuits, aims to better understand depression, brain disorders and mental illness. Malenka also assumes directorship of Stanford's Nancy Friend Pritzker Laboratory, one of the few facilities in the country focusing on interdisciplinary research on the basic biology of brain function and human behavior. In 1977, Jay Pritzker, a
successful Chicago investor and founder of the Hyatt
hotel chain, and his wife, Cindy, endowed the psychiatry
and behavioral sciences professorship in memory of their
daughter, Stanford alumna Nancy Friend Pritzker (class of
1970), who died in 1972. The Pritzker family also
established the Pritzker laboratory at Stanford and the
Nancy Pritzker Network on Depression Research, a
consortium of scientists from the psychiatry departments
at Stanford, Cornell University and the University of
Michigan. SR
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