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Director's Message »
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Message from the Executive Director:This is an exciting time to be the Executive Director of the Evelyn F. And William L. McKnight Brain Institute, as we have now settled down from the process of creating this amazing institute and have been provided with a new command from the university leadership to take us toward becoming the world premier brain research endeavor. As such, I can appreciate the wonderful efforts and work of Drs. Bill Luttge, Doug Anderson, and Al Rhoton in bringing us to this point where we can raise our sights and focus on our long term ambitions and the challenges we know lie ahead. I am absolutely delighted to be the Director, and I am completely confident that we will utilize our existing strengths in basic and clinical research to build even a better brain institute with the goal of treating and curing neurological disorders. Along this line, my goal is to focus the MBI.s endeavors on Neural Diagnostics and Neural Therapeutics. We will translate basic and clinical science in these areas to new protocols that focus on a variety of diseases. The institute should then be viewed as both a place to diagnose and study the bases for neurological disease, as well as being extremely conducive for the development of new therapeutics for CNS diseases and injuries that fall into 6 core areas listed below. CORES TO TRANSLATE THERAPIES: AGE-RELATED MEMORY LOSS AND COGNITION BRAIN CANCER CNS INJURY, INCLUDING POST-TRAUMATIC AND STROKE CHRONIC NEUROLOGICAL DISEASES (Including Movement Disorders Such as Parkinson.s Disease, Multiple Sclerosis, Alzheimer.s Disease, Epilepsy, and Neuromuscular Disorders) DEVELOPMENT, REGENERATION, AND REHABILITATION MENTAL HEALTH, NEUROBEHAVIORAL SCIENCES, PSYCHIATRY (Including Schizophrenia, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Addiction) In addition to serving several colleges (e.g. Medicine, Allied Health, Liberal Arts and Sciences, Engineering, Veterinary Medicine, Dentistry, and Engineering), and collaborating with all of the wonderful centers and programs on campus, we will focus our in-house and cross-campus departments (over 50 of them) and investigators (over 300 of them) toward clinical trials in the very near future. My immediate goal is to realign the resources and infrastructure of the MBI to fully utilize faculty strengths. Six strong cores will be further developed utilizing valuable tissue, cellular, and genetic reagents, as well as numerous models of neurological disease. In addition to new recruits, the creation of new programmatic laboratories and clinical trial centers will be dedicated to taking discoveries from the 6 cores toward translation into viable therapies. With all of us dedicated to the mission of the Evelyn F. and William L. McKnight Brain Institute to not only be the best in the world, but also to rapidly apply our growing knowledge of the nervous system toward curing debilitating neurological diseases, I look forward to announcing exciting breakthroughs in the world of restorative neuroscience. Since we have many of the tools already in place, and the fields of neuro-imaging, models of neurological disease, and regenerative medicine are moving rapidly ahead, I am hopeful that you will see these announcements coming at a swift and steady pace.
Dennis A. Steindler, Ph.D. |
 Copyright © 2002 McKnight Brain Institute of the University of Florida |
