Director’s Message

Welcome to the Brudnick Neuropsychiatric Research Institute (BNRI) within the Neurobiology Department of the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School.

Founded in 2000 through generous support by the Brudnick family, the mission of the BNRI is to  elucidate the neurobiology underlying neuropsychiatric diseases including depression, anxiety, and drug use disorders in an effort to identify novel therapeutic strategies for more effective treatments. To advance this mission, our talented group of faculty and researchers use modern basic neuroscience approaches including optogenetics, spatial transcriptomics, viral-mediated circuit mapping and neuroimaging, and the mouse as a model organism, to identify circuits, molecular mechanisms, and neurophysiology contributing to neuropsychiatric-associated behaviors under normal and disease conditions.  Our work is further advanced through collaboration, particularly between the Neurobiology and Psychiatry departments within UMass Chan Medical School, which serves to foster a diverse group of multidisciplinary researchers towards the common goal of understanding the mysteries of the brain including how the brain generates behavior and how this process is dysregulated in neuropsychiatric disorders.

In addition to our research endeavors, our faculty, staff, as well as our state-of-the-art research laboratories, housed in the Paul J. DiMare Center, provide a robust, multifaceted training environment for graduate students, drawn from UMass Chan Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and postdoctoral fellows preparing them for independent careers in biomedical research.

Thank you for your interest in our work. Please do not hesitate to contact us for more information.

 

Andrew R. Tapper, Ph.D.

Director, Brudnick Neuropsychiatric Research Institute

Professor of Neurobiology