The Psychiatric Foundation of North Carolina announced that P. Jeffrey Conn, Ph.D. has been awarded the 2014 V. Sagar Sethi, MD Mental Health Research Award during the NC Psychiatric Association’s Annual Meeting and Scientific Session, Sept. 25-28 in Wrightsville Beach. The national award honors a scientist for significant contributions to basic research in the neurosciences, psychology or pharmacology at a molecular, cellular or behavioral level.

Conn is the Lee E. Limbird Professor of Pharmacology, and founding director of the Program in Translational Neuropharmacology at the Vanderbilt Center for Neuroscience Drug Discovery. He is a pioneer in the pharmacology of metabotropic glutamate receptors and muscarinic acetylcholine receptors, and has translated his basic science discoveries into the clinic with these targets for schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease and fragile X syndrome.

As the Sethi Award recipient, Dr. Conn received a monetary award and presented the lecture, “Meeting the Challenge: Discovery of New Medicines for Therapeutic Agents for Treatment of Brain Disorders,” on Sunday, Sept. 28, during the Wrightsville Beach conference. Previous winners of the Sethi Award include Patrick Sullivan, MD, the lead researcher from UNC – Chapel Hill in the recent large-scale study that found genetic links to schizophrenia, and Charles Nemeroff, MD, Ph.D. from Miami University School of Medicine.

The V. Sagar Sethi, M.D. Mental Health Research Award was created in 2011 with an endowment to the Psychiatric Foundation of North Carolina from Dr. Sethi, a practicing psychiatrist in Charlotte and a long-time member of the North Carolina and American Psychiatric Associations.

For more information, visit The Psychiatric Foundation of North Carolina’s website.