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Director's Message »
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Message from the Executive Director:This is an exciting and rewarding time to be the Executive Director of the Evelyn F. and William L. McKnight Brain Institute. We have settled down from the period when so much energy was required to create this unique institute. The University's leaders are providing us with the kind of support and direction that will enable us to become the world's premier brain research enterprise. As such, I honor and appreciate the tireless efforts and highly effective and creative work of Drs. Bill Luttge, Doug Anderson, and Al Rhoton in bringing us to this point. I am pleased to have been chosen to be the Institute's second Director, and I am completely confident that we will succeed in using our existing strengths in basic and clinical research to build even a more extraordinary 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 will address a wide range and variety of diseases. The institute should then be viewed as a place to diagnose and study the basis for neurological disease, as well as a place to develop new therapeutics for central nervous system (CNS) diseases and injuries that fall into the six core areas listed below.
CORES TO TRANSLATE into THERAPIES:The six cores are:
In addition to incorporating the work of a number of colleges (e.g. Medicine, Allied Health, Liberal Arts and Sciences, Engineering, Veterinary Medicine, Dentistry, and Engineering), and collaborating with all of the distinguished 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) on clinical trials in the very near future. My immediate goal is to realign the resources and infrastructure of the MBI to make full use of faculty strengths. The 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 recruiting additional faculty members, the creation of new programmatic laboratories and clinical trial centers will be dedicated to translating the discoveries from the six cores into viable therapies. With all of us dedicated to the mission of the Evelyn F. and William L. McKnight Brain Institute to be not only 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.
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