The Molecular & Behavioral Neuroscience Institute (MBNI)
Fifty years ago, America’s perception of mental health was a lot different from today. Psychiatrists and psychologists struggled to explain mental illnesses in scientific terms, and to provide treatment to those who faced them.
One man who knew that research was the only way to overcome this impasse was Raymond Waggoner, chair of the U-M Department of Psychiatry. He convinced the state of Michigan to provide the initial funding to establish the Mental Health Research Institute at the University, with the goal of conducting basic laboratory-based research on mental health.
Waggoner charged the MHRI’s interdisciplinary team with the mission of “applying scientific methods to the study of human behavior, normal and abnormal.” At the time, it was unprecedented for geneticists, biochemists, anatomists, physiologists, pharmacologists, clinical investigators and psychologists to work together as a team.
Today, 51 years later, Dr. Waggoner’s forward-looking approach has paid off. The Institute’s 20 scientists are leader in affective and cognitive neuroscience, developmental neurobiology, cell signaling, and neurogenetics and genomics.
Together with their laboratory teams, they have made many important discoveries about how the brain functions, how its mechanisms are altered in people with mental illness, and how genes and molecules influence human behavior.
In 2005, to celebrate its half-century anniversary, the Institute changed its name to better reflect today’s science.
Now known as the Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Institute, it will continue to foster work on the cutting edge of brain science, to collaborate with clinical investigators in the Depression Center, the Department of Psychiatry, and other parts of the Health System, and train tomorrow’s researchers to prepare them for decades of discovery.
Click here to visit the Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Institute website.