Dr. Kendler to begin prestigious fellowship at Stanford

By Lorraine Cichowski
VCU News Services

Kenneth S. Kendler, M.D., the Rachel Brown Banks Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Professor of Human Genetics, begins a 10-month sabbatical from VCU next month to write a book as a fellow at the elite Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, CA.

Kendler is one of 42 scientists and distinguished scholars representing a wide range of disciplines from anthropology, literature and law to philosophy, psychiatry and sociology who were hand-picked to study and write at the postdoctoral institution located on a hill overlooking the Stanford University campus. He will be the only physician in the group, which comes from as far away as the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, Free University Berlin in Germany and the University of Uppsala in Sweden.

“I’ve been interested in taking a sabbatical for several years, to provide a time to reflect and write, to ponder the priorities of the rest of my scientific career. It was an honor for me and for VCU to be asked to join this very prestigious program,” says Kendler, one of the most-quoted scholars in the world who came to VCU in 1983, specializing in psychiatric genetics.

The Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences was established in 1954 by the Ford Foundation to advance the development of the behavioral sciences as well as those aspects of physical and biological science and the humanities relevant to behavior.

The center’s $6 million endowment comes from the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Foundations’ Fund for Research in Psychiatry. Among the many other recent grants to the foundation are those from Citicorp Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Institute of Mental Health, National Science Foundation and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Fellows are nominated by other scholars, academic administrators and former fellows, among others. The nominations are rated by a review panel, and selection is made by the foundation’s board of trustees. The fellowship carries a stipend.

Kendler plans to begin working on a book summarizing the extensive studies he and colleagues have conducted on psychiatric and drug abuse disorders in the Mid-Atlantic Twin Registry (MATR) over the last 15 years. The MATR is based at VCU and has formed the basis for many of the genetic and psychiatric studies completed by the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics. Kendler plans to work on the book with his close colleague, Dr. Carol A. Prescott, associate professor of psychiatry at VCU.

Kendler is director of one of the two inter-related research groups that make up the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics, a joint initiative of VCU’s Departments of Psychiatry and Human Genetics. He will not be replaced in that role during his sabbatical. The other research group is directed by Lindon J. Eaves, Ph.D., distinguished professor of human genetics and psychiatry.

The time at Stanford will be a return visit for Kendler, who earned his medical degree there in 1977. He completed his residency in psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine, where he was a biological scientist training program fellow. He also studied biometrical genetics at the University of Birmingham in Birmingham, England, and taught and did research at the Bronx VA Medical Center and Mt. Sinai School of Medicine before coming to VCU.

His many honors include the VCU Distinguished Faculty Award for Scholarship, the Lieber Prize for Outstanding Research in Schizophrenia, First Prize from the Anna-Monika Foundation for outstanding contributions to research on depression and the Stanley R. Dean and Kurt Schneider Scientific awards for exceptional scientific achievement in schizophrenia.

He became a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 1999. He was honored recently with the 2002 Rema Lapouse Award, given annually by the American Public Health Association for lifetime significant contributions to the scientific understanding of the epidemiology and control of mental disorders, and the 2003 Erik Stromgren Medal and Memorial Lectureship, given by Denmark’s Stromgren Foundation.