Fritz Henn Named Brookhaven Lab's Associate Director for Life Sciences
April 14, 2006
UPTON, NY - Fritz Henn, a board-certified psychiatrist and former Director of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, has been named Associate Laboratory Director for Life Sciences at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, effective April 1.
Henn will oversee the Laboratory's Biology and Medical Departments, which together have 180 employees and a yearly budget of $33 million. Research in the life sciences at Brookhaven includes sophisticated imaging techniques, basic studies on DNA, proteins, molecular and cellular mechanisms, and biomedical and environmental applications based on this research.
One of Henn's primary goals for his directorate is to form partnerships with medical schools so that clinicians and laboratory researchers can pool their expertise to perform medical research using advanced imaging equipment at Brookhaven. He has already helped to establish a Joint Center for Translational Biomedical Imaging with the Mount Sinai School of Medicine (see previous release).
"Brookhaven Lab has a first-class medical imaging center, which is now consolidated under the Medical Department," Henn said. "My goal is to continue our proven leadership in this area. Brookhaven researchers have already made significant progress in understanding such conditions as addiction and obesity. My own areas of interest are depression and neurodegenerative diseases. With the Laboratory's imaging equipment, we can actually see the functioning of the brain as well as its structure. The brain is science's next exciting challenge - it's still largely a mystery."
The Life Sciences Directorate will also be playing an expanding role in the Genomes to Life program, a U.S. Department of Energy initiative that supports advanced biological research in the area of bioenergy, with the goal of developing cost-effective, biologically based renewable energy sources to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign fuels. Henn noted that this program will give the Life Sciences Directorate new opportunities to work with researchers in other departments at the Laboratory, such as Chemistry, the Center for Functional Nanomaterials, and Energy Sciences and Technology.
"My long-term goal is to gain funding from the Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services so that we can develop new technologies for medical research in order to make Brookhaven a medical user facility - a place where medical researchers could use our state-of-the-art technologies to do research in neuroscience," Henn said. "We want to also expand our supercomputing facilities for research in the areas of computational neuroscience and computational structural biology."
Fritz Henn earned a Ph.D. in physiological chemistry from The Johns Hopkins University in 1967, and an M.D. from the University of Virginia in 1971. He performed his residency in the Department of Psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine from 1971 to 1974. Henn began his career at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, and, in 1982, he joined Stony Brook University (SBU), where he became Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine. In addition, from 1982 to 1983, he was Director of the Long Island Research Institute, New York State Office of Mental Health, and, from 1983 to 1994, he was Director for SBU's Institute for Mental Health Research. He moved to Germany in 1994, becoming a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Heidelberg and Director of the Central Institute of Mental Health, positions he held until he joined Brookhaven.
2006-10467 | INT/EXT | Newsroom
