Brain & Behavior Research Foundation’s Mental Health Women's Lunch

Ellen Levine, former Editorial Director at Hearst Magazines, will lead a wide-ranging conversation with pioneering mental health researchers Dolores Malaspina, M.D. and Myrna Weissman, Ph.D., at the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation’s Women Breaking the Silence About Mental Illness Luncheon Tuesday, April 25, 2017 at 11 a.m. reception; 12 p.m. to 2 p.m. luncheon at the Metropolitan Club, One East 60th Street, Manhattan. The luncheon will raise money to help the Foundation—the top non-governmental funder of mental health research—accomplish its mission to alleviate the suffering caused by mental illness by funding research that will lead to better diagnosis and treatment. The luncheon committee is co-chaired by Suzanne Golden, Carole Mallement and Barbara Streicker. Tickets are $300. To make a reservation, email rlaquercia@bbrfoundation.org; or call 646-681-4878. For more information about BBRF, visit www.bbrfoundation.org

Dr. Malaspina, the Anita & Joseph Steckler Professor of Psychiatry and Child Psychiatry, former chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center, and host of the Psychiatry Show on Sirius XM’s Doctor Radio, has spent her career working to understand schizophrenia, which afflicts her younger sister. Her groundbreaking work found that a quarter of all people living with schizophrenia may owe their symptoms to spontaneous mutations in paternal sperm, which are more likely to occur in older fathers. Still a practicing clinician, Dr. Malaspina has received two Young Investigator Grants, as well as Independent and Distinguished Investigator Grants from the Foundation.

Dr. Weissman, the Diane Goldman Kemper Family Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, and Chief of the Division of Epidemiology at New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI), specializes in understanding rates and risks of mood and anxiety disorders, and is working to bring psychiatric epidemiology closer to translational studies in neuroscience and genetics. For more than 30 years, she has directed a three-generation study of families at risk for depression. She also directs a study to determine the impact of maternal remission from depression on children and was one of the developers of Interpersonal Psychotherapy, an evidence-based treatment for depression. Dr. Weissman is a member of the Foundation’s Scientific Council, a three time Distinguished Investigator Grantee, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.