David H. Zald has been appointed director of the new Rutgers Center for Advanced Human Brain Imaging Research at the Rutgers Brain Health Institute. Zald will also serve as a tenured professor and will hold a Henry Rutgers Term Chair in the Department of Psychiatry at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. His new role will begin May 2020.

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David H. Zald. Courtesy of Rutgers.

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At present, Zald is the Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Psychology and director of the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program for Undergraduates at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. He has written more than 150 articles describing brain changes associated with Parkinson’s disease, obsessive compulsive disorder, and many other mental illnesses, and has been cited more than 16,000× in scientific literature.

The new research center, which will open in the fall of 2020, is to be housed in the Staged Research Building on Busch Campus in Piscataway. The center will develop novel therapies for neuropsychiatric and neurological disorders, including addiction, schizophrenia, anxiety, depression, autism, brain injury, and Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, said Gary Aston-Jones, director of the Rutgers Brain Health Institute.