I am a board-certified psychiatrist at the University of Iowa and VA hospital in Iowa City. I have over 25 years of experience diagnosing and treating severe mental illnesses, including opioid use disorder, which I encounter most frequently in my duties on the consult liaison service. I am also a neuroscientist, and my career-defining focus has been elucidating roles of acid-sensing ion channels (ASICs) and brain pH in neuron function, signaling, and disease. The current proposal is an extension of these studies and the observations that acetazolamide (AZD), CA4, and ASICs influence synaptic plasticity in the nucleus accumbens evoked by cocaine and opioids. Our exciting results indicate that AZD can correct synaptic rearrangements induced by opioids and their withdrawal (likely via CA4 and ASICs), and may thereby help reduce opioid-seeking behavior, craving, and relapse. We plan to publish manuscripts describing these finds in the near future, which we anticipate will have a broad impact.  The projects described in this Opioid Use Disorder-Research Program of Excellence (OUD-RPOE) will translate these discoveries to human clinical and brain imaging, thus exploring the possibility that brain pH dynamics may prove an effective therapeutic target for combatting OUD.  More than this, the OUD-RPOE will be instrumental for establishing a foundation at Iowa for identifying, testing, and implementing new therapies for substance use disorders in general.

 Beyond my clinical and research activities, much of my career has been devoted to mentoring others. I was recently appointed the Vice Chair for Research in the Psychiatry Department at the University of Iowa and I am Associate Director for Translational Research in the newly founded Iowa Institute for Neuroscience.  I am also the Co-Director of a T32 Institutional Training Grant headed by Dr. Peg Nopoulos focusing on Mental Illness entitled “The Iowa Neuroscience Specialty Program in Research Education (INSPIRE)”. Through these positions I am acquiring significant experience, recruiting mentoring and advising students, junior and mid-career faculty. I have mentored a substantial number of trainees and have served on numerous thesis committees. More than twenty graduate students, post-docs, and junior faculty have trained in my lab, including several MSTP students. Many of these have won awards for their work in my lab and have gone on to successfully continue their academic careers.