Kerry J. Ressler, M.D., Ph.D. ACNP President

Sarah Timm, CAE, CMP-HC

ACNP Executive Director

This year's Annual Meeting will be held in a hybrid meeting format allowing members and invited guests to attend in-person at the JW Marriott Tampa Water Street and Tampa Marriott Water Street in Tampa, Florida or virtually on the ACNP Virtual Meeting Platform.

Click here to read the Annual Meeting Frequently Asked Questions!

Career Development Session: Negotiation Strategies: Real World Advice to Advance Career Development

Sponsored by the Career Development Committee

Tuesday, December 5th

1:00 PM - 2:30 PM Eastern Time 



Successful career development across academia and industry is predicated upon multiple factors including rigorous academic training, mentorship, and availability of necessary resources. One such critical factor that is essential to all aspects of career development is negotiation strategy. Indeed, negotiation strategy is involved at the beginning, the middle, and the end of a career journey and can be for something as small as negotiating for a new office desk to something bigger like a new career position and role. Consciously and unconsciously, negotiation strategies occur daily, are involved in all transactional interactions, and can make or break a career. There will be a moderated Q&A session following the panelists' discussion.

Chairs: Christine Ann Denny, Ph.D., and Shawn McClintock, Ph.D.

Presenters:

We are pleased to announce the following individuals have been selected to the 2024 Nominating Committee:

Carolyn Rodriguez, M.D., Ph.D., Chair

Olusola Ajilore, M.D., Ph.D.

Tracy Bale, Ph.D.

Jill Becker, Ph.D.

Sabina Berretta, M.D.

Peter Kalivas, Ph.D.

The 2023 committee chair, Anissa Abi-Dargham, M.D., will serve as ex officio to the committee.

The ACNP URM Near-Peer Mentorship Program is the College's newest initiative to promote and sustain diversity in the ACNP pipeline; this program is designed to provide year-long one-on-one mentorship support from ACNP members to under-represented minorities who plan to enter or are early career scientists in research fields in and adjacent to neuropsychopharmacology. The program provides education on topics such as career skills, goal setting, negotiating, time management, starting a lab, negotiating positions, career life balance, and culturally responsive mentorship relationships. This is an intensive multi-year program that includes monthly virtual mentoring, monthly training workshops, and an annual in-person half-day mentorship program just prior to the ACNP Annual Meeting. The program will be managed by the ACNP URM Mentoring Task Force and the College, utilizing materials from the Center for the Improvement for Mentored Experiences in Research (CIMER). The goal of the program is to optimize mentoring relationships by providing mentors and mentees with an intellectual framework for effective mentoring relationships, an opportunity to experiment with various methods, and a forum in which to solve mentor/mentee dilemmas with the help of their peers.

The 2022 cohort included 10 mentor/mentee pairs, the 2023 cohort included 12 mentor/mentee pairs, and the 2024 cohort will include 12 mentor/mentee pairs. In 2023, volunteers from the ACNP Education & Training Committee and URM Mentoring Task Force took over facilitating the program sessions utilizing the materials from CIMER and incorporating ongoing mentee/mentor needs. If you are interested in learning more about the program or in applying to it, either as a mentee or a mentor, please contact Jill Bracey in the ACNP Executive Office (jbracey@acnp.org) or visit the URM Near-Peer Mentorship Program poster during the poster sessions at the ACNP Annual Meeting.

Taking Risks

The decline of disruptiveness in science¹ has garnered much attention recently. If successful, high-risk, high-reward research has the potential to create or overturn fundamental paradigms and accelerate the pace of biomedical discoveries. But because the risk of failure is inherently high, this type of work is rarely supported. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that as scientists, our decisions are heavily influenced by perceived probability of risk and reward.  

Council Minutes

Did you know that all of the Council Minutes are placed on the ACNP Website in the Member's Only section?

Please click here and log-in to read the Council Minutes from 2023 and previous Council Minutes to stay informed on Council discussions and decisions. 

The College would like to highlight the new 2023 Associate Member Class!

Meet the Editors

The NPP Senior Editor team is delighted to invite ACNP Annual Meeting attendees to our "Meet the Editors" session, to be held on Monday, December 4th from 2:30 PM - 3:00 PM at the journal tables in the Ybor Ballroom foyer in the JW Marriott (immediately following the Distinguished Lecture). The purpose of this informal meeting is to get to know the editors, learn about the journal's review processes from choosing the initial reviewers to the final decision, and discuss potential submissions.

"This Week in NPP"

Starting in October 2023, NPP provides brief, online summaries of Advanced Online Publication (AOP) content (reviews, research articles) on a weekly basis in a new feature called “This Week in NPP” on social media. This will be distributed through social media (e.g., X), and is geared towards the media and general public to provide wider dissemination of our content in a simplified manner. Beginning in April 2024, we will introduce “This Month in NPP” which will roll out these summaries in each monthly print issue. 

The Principal Editors would like to thank Briana Chen, B.S., M.S., our 2023 NPP Editorial Intern, and the members of our NPP Editorial Team, for their stewardship of this new NPP Journal initiative. 

Emeritus Member Interviews

Interview with Fellow Emeritus Member, Rita Valentinio, Ph.D.

Interviewed by Christie Fowler, Ph.D., Scientific Communications Committee Member

Interview with Fellow Emeritus Member, Harriet de Wit, Ph.D.

Interviewed by Suma Jacob, M.D., Ph.D., Scientific Communications Committee Member

How COVID-19 Affects the Brain

Maura Boldrini, M.D., Ph.D.

2023/2024 ACNP/AMP BRAD Fellow!

Lindsey Galbo Thomma, Ph.D.

Post-Doctoral Research Fellow

The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio

David Jentsch, Ph.D., Animal Research Committee Member, interviewed Lindsey Galbo Thomma on her plans for the fellowship.

Support a Scientist is an ACNP/AMP BRAD video series project providing a platform for scientists to talk about their research with a wider audience. The project aims are to provide a “face” to science, establish importance of a specific area of research, highlight the role of animal research in the study, and offer insights on how science is conducted. All of the Support a Scientist videos are posted on the BRAD website, shared on social media, and can also be featured in ACNP member communications, website and social media feeds as well as shared with public audiences.

We are looking for more scientists to highlight, and encourage you to nominate an animal researcher you know (including postdoctoral fellows) using this sign-up link or by reaching out to us at BRAD@amprogress.org. Guidance is provided to scientists on how to shape their message for the public, and more information about the program is available upon request. 

The American Brain Coalition (ABC), American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP) and Cohen Veterans Bioscience (CVB) hosted a special discussion on September 11th with leaders from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) on the barriers and challenges to research with psychedelics compounds. 

The Congressional Neuroscience Caucus (CNC), in cooperation with the American Brain Coalition (ABC), the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP), the American Psychological Association (APA), and the Dana Foundation, hosted a virtual Congressional briefing on September 20th examining the impact of social media on youth mental health, highlighting the findings from the largest long-term study of brain development and child health ever conducted in the United States.

• December 3-6, 2023: ACNP 62nd Annual Meeting, Tampa, Florida 
• January 12, 2024: ACNP Annual Meeting Evaluation / CME Certificate and Deadline to View the Session Recordings
• April 2024: Travel Award Applications Deadline
• May 2024: Submissions of Overall Propsals by Chairs (Panels, Mini-Panels, and Study Group) Deadline

Upcoming Meetings:

To see a list of upcoming meetings in the field of neuropsychopharmacology, please click below:

Employment and Grant Opportunities:

To see a list of new employment and grant opportunities in the field of neuropsychopharmacology, please click below:

Website Updates:

For a full listing of the ACNP Staff in the Executive Office, click here.

The American College of Psychiatrists honors leaders in mental healthcare by recognizing those individuals responsible for advancing psychiatry through their service, research, clinical work, and educational activities. The following awards are presented during the Annual Meeting.

Winter Awards DEADLINE for 2025: January 5, 2024

• The Award for Leadership in Child, Adolescent and Young Adult Psychiatry recognizes an individual who has made sustained and substantial contributions to child, adolescent and young adult mental health as evidenced by leadership in scholarly contributions, clinical service, education, and/or advocacy efforts. In addition to receiving a grant and a certificate, the awardee delivers a featured lecture at the Annual Meeting.
• The Award for Research in Geriatric Psychiatry is given to an individual who has contributed to advances in geropsychiatry. In addition to receiving a grant and a certificate, the awardee delivers a featured lecture at the Annual Meeting. 
• The Stanley Dean Award for Research in Schizophrenia honors an individual or a group that has made a major contribution to the understanding and treatment of schizophrenic disorders. In addition to receiving a grant and a certificate, the awardee delivers a featured lecture at the Annual Meeting. 
• The Award for Research in Mood Disorders is given to an individual who has advanced the understanding and treatment of mood disorders. In addition to receiving a grant and a certificate, the awardee delivers a featured lecture at the Annual Meeting.

To learn more about these honors, or to nominate a colleague, please visit The College website: http://www.acpsych.org/awards.

In view of the ACNP's expertise in the area of methodological approaches to studying mental health, The Galenos Ontology Team would like to invite ACNP members to be members of the Advisory Board of the Mental Health Ontology, which is being developed as part of the GALENOS Project (https://galenos.org.uk/). 

GALENOS (Global Alliance for Living Evidence on aNxiety, depressiOn and pSychosis) is a three-year Wellcome-funded, international evidence synthesis project that will produce a series of free-to-access living systematic reviews on new research questions aimed at generating evidence to inform more effective interventions for anxiety, depression and psychosis. To support evidence searches, data extraction and synthesis during these reviews, a group within this project is developing the Mental Health Ontology. This ontology will serve as a classification system of labels and definitions of entities relevant to mental health and specify the relationships between these entities. 

The members of the Mental Health Ontology Advisory Board will be key to bringing a breadth of experience, expertise and perspective to our work and enable the ontology to reflect and integrate a broad range of views on mental health and intervention to prevent and reduce mental ill-health. We will ask Advisory Board members to provide feedback on the sources we should draw on to develop the ontology, as well as the ontology’s entities and relationships between them.  

If interested, please email paulina.schenk.13@ucl.ac.uk. More information can be found in the Terms of Reference for the advisory board.



Kind Regards,  

Professor Susan Michie, Professor Janna Hastings and Dr. Paulina Schenk 

The Galenos Ontology Team