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Chip Gerfen, PhD - Scientific Advisory Board
Bethesda, Maryland

Dr. Gerfen received a B.A. from Amherst College and Ph.D. from Northwestern University. His doctoral research was on neural substrates of reward involving the prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia. During a post-doctoral fellowship in the Laboratory of Max Cowan at the Salk Institute, he developed the PHA-L axonal tracing technique with Paul Sawchenko. In 1983, Dr. Gerfen was recruited by Ed Evarts to the Laboratory of Neurophysiology within NIMH to work on the neuroanatomy of the forebrain and established some of the functional prinicples of the organization of the basal ganglia. Dr. Gerfen's lab now works on receptor mediated gene regulation, with an emphasis on how functionally defined neurons in the forebrain display distinct forms of neuronal plasticity, dependent on differential regulation of multiple protein kinase signaling pathways.