The Gerald L. Klerman Award is the highest honor that DBSA gives to members of the scientific community. Presented each year, this award recognizes researchers whose work advances knowledge of the causes, diagnosis, and treatment of depression and bipolar disorder. Up to two awards are given annually in each of the following two categories: DBSA Gerald L. Klerman Award, Senior Investigator, and DBSA Gerald L. Klerman Award, Young Investigator.
Dr. Katherine E. Burdick | 2022 Senior Investigator Award
Dr. Burdick is the Jonathan F. Borus, MD Distinguished Chair in Psychiatry and the Vice Chair for Research in Psychiatry at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA. She is the Director of the Mood and Psychosis Research Program at BWH and is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. She also serves as scientific chair for the new non-profit research foundation Breakthrough Discovery for Thriving with Bipolar Disorders (‘BD-squared’) and participates as a member of the Board of Directors for the National Network of Depression Centers (NNDC), and the International Society for Bipolar Disorders (ISBD), and as a member of DBSA’s SAB.
Dr. Burdick’s work is focused on neurocognition in major psychiatric disorders, with specific expertise in bipolar disorder (BD). One of the first in the field to acknowledge the presence of cognitive impairment in BD, she has dedicated the past two decades to investigating the clinical, biological, neuroimaging, genetic, and functional correlates of this phenomenon. Dr. Burdick’s work has also highlighted the need to target this domain directly with treatment to promote full recovery in every patient. She has received several awards for her work in this area, including the prestigious Colvin Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Mood Disorders Research from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation in 2021. She is also a dedicated mentor and hopes to help to cultivate the next generation of researchers in the mood disorders field.
Dr. Georgina Mayling Hosang | 2022 Young Investigator Award
Dr. Hosang is an Associate Professor at Wolfson Institute of Population Health, Queen Mary, University of London (UK). She completed her PhD in Social, Genetic, and Developmental Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Neuroscience, King’s College London, UK, and was then awarded the prestigious ESRC/MRC Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Fellowship. Between 2012 and 2017 she was an Assistant Professor at Middlesex University and Goldsmiths, University of London.
Dr. Hosang’s interdisciplinary work focuses on the impact of life stress (childhood trauma and recent life events) on the onset and course (including physical health outcomes) of bipolar disorder and depression. For instance, she has conducted some of the first and only studies exploring the genetic and life stress interactions in bipolar disorder (Hosang et al., 2010; 2017). She published one of the first papers showing that exposure to childhood maltreatment (abuse and neglect) considerably increases the odds of having multiple physical conditions for people with bipolar disorder (Hosang et al., 2018).
In recent years she has become interested in the developmental pathway from adolescent hypomania to bipolar disorder using twin data. Her work has shown that adolescent hypomania is distinct from ADHD (Hosang et al., 2019, JAMA Psychiatry) and is significantly related to the development of bipolar disorder (Hosang et al., 2022, JAMA Psychiatry). For this work, she won the Samuel Gershon Junior Investigator Prize awarded by the International Society of Bipolar Disorder in 2019. Dr. Hosang’s research has been funded by several agencies including the UK’s Economic Social Research Council, Medical Research Council, National Institute of Health Research, and the International Bipolar Foundation.
