Psychiatrist to Lead Major UCLA Study Seeking Genetic Links in Depression

Battle Against the Blues

To explore the genetic components of depression, Jonathan Flint, a molecular psychiatrist, and his research team analyzed DNA sequences of more than 5,000 Chinese women who were severely depressed and more than 5,000 who were not. His study was the first to report a link to specific genes.

So far his research provides only the inkling of an understanding of the role of genetics in depression, but it has just taken Dr. Flint from the University of Oxford to a key role in a major effort at the University of California at Los Angeles: the Depression Grand Challenge. With an anticipated budget of $525 million for its first decade alone, the Grand Challenge aims to halve by 2050 the health and economic impacts of depression.

As one of four directors of the challenge, Dr. Flint will lead a 100,000-person investigation, called the largest-ever genetic study of a single disorder. “UCLA has managed, as much as one can within a university, to get the academics working together,” he says. “There are resources that appear just because you get collaborations from lots of groups.”

So, for example, the study will involve not just medical specialists but also engineers thinking of ways to assess research subjects around the clock and economists studying the costs of depression, says Dr. Flint.

Also appealing, he says, is that UCLA is mulling a novel approach to financing. It hopes to scour its two-million-patient medical system for people willing to pay to enroll in studies in return for benefiting from their eventual treatment results: to “become not just subjects of the study, but stakeholders in the entire enterprise,” as Dr. Flint says.

The approach will have regulatory and legal hurdles, acknowledges Dr. Flint, who is a professor in residence at UCLA’s department of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine as well as a senior scientist at the Center for Neurobehavioral Genetics at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. But he takes heart, he says, in “the success of new companies like 23andMe, which has both sold genetic and phenotypic information to individuals, and used it in research projects.”

Among the challenges as he gets the new study up and running, he says, is to dispel skepticism about his China study’s findings. Eight years ago, when he started searching for genetic links in that study, he worried about the approach, too, he says. Now, even though extending the approach will not be straightforward, “we think we have this right.” — Peter Monaghan

The Art of Acquisitions

Just months after becoming director of the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History at Duke University, in 2012, John B. Gartrell inadvertently got the chance to lay the groundwork for a major acquisition that became final last year.

At a meeting on Duke’s campus, he met Robert A. Hill, owner of a collection of research materials and papers on Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican-born black-nationalist leader.

Mr. Hill, an emeritus professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles, is editor in chief of a series, the Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers. Duke University Press published the project’s most recent volumes.

The two men discovered that they had mutual friends and, before Mr. Hill left, he invited Mr. Gartrell to go to California and see the materials he had collected on Mr. Garvey for more than 30 years. “It was quite evident to me at the time that this was something extremely unique,” says Mr. Gartrell of the collection, which fills more than 300 boxes.

Mr. Gartrell relies on relationship-building skills — he’s a self-described “people person” — and plenty of patience. It can take months, even years, of discussions to fine-tune exactly how a collection will change hands.

“You have to be mindful that for a lot of people this is their life’s work or something they’ve dedicated their life to collecting,” says Mr. Gartrell, who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from Morgan State University. “It’s often a process for them to let go of it.”

The Duke center, part of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, was 20 years old in 2015. Last year it also celebrated the centennial birthday of the historian it was named for, John Hope Franklin, who died in 2009.

“We’re extremely proud of all the collections we’ve brought in to date,” Mr. Gartrell says. The Marcus Garvey papers add new depth to the center’s holdings, he says.

“It’s a major collection that touches on the black diaspora and the Caribbean in a way that our other collections don’t.” — Audrey Williams June

Honor for a Trailblazer

Fannie Gaston-Johansson, who was named a Living Legend by the American Academy of Nursing last year, has made her mark in both the United States and Sweden for her research on pain management, breast cancer, and end-of-life care, and for her development of a tool that helps patients characterize their pain.

Now a professor emerita at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, she was the first African-American woman to become a full professor with tenure at Hopkins, in 1998. The Living Legend distinction, awarded to a few people each year, is the nursing academy’s highest honor.

Ms. Gaston-Johansson has long striven to promote diversity. As head of Hopkins’s Minority Global Health Disparities Research Training program, she used National Institutes of Health money to send students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds abroad to do research. She also worked to increase the number of minority students at Hopkins. “I tried to be a representative of how much you could accomplish at a place like Hopkins regardless of your ethnic backgrzound,” she says.

Her own study abroad as a graduate student led to a career on two continents. A native of North Carolina, she received her doctorate from the University of Gothenburg, in Sweden, and was later dean of nursing there. At Gothenburg she developed a pain-assessment tool, the Pain-O-Meter.

“Many times people come to the ER and can’t find the words to describe the pain,” she says. “The Pain-O-Meter lists the words and helps them express their pain.” She hopes that one day the tool will be used at home, just as someone would use a thermometer.

For several years, she divided her time between Hopkins’s campus, in Baltimore, and Gothenburg, where she worked to establish a doctoral program in nursing.

With its flexibility, “Hopkins opened the door to so many possibilities for me in the international world,” she says.

While Ms. Gaston-Johansson officially “retired” from Hopkins in 2014, she says her work is far from over. She is doing research on disparities in the treatment of African-American women with triple-negative breast cancer, and continues to mentor junior faculty at Hopkins. — Mary Bowerman

New Leader at Hamilton

David Wippman, dean of the University of Minnesota Law School since 2008 and an expert on international law, will become president of Hamilton College in July.

During his tenure as dean, the law school introduced a master’s-degree program in patent law for scientists and engineers and established the Center for New Americans, which provides legal services for noncitizens.

Before he became dean, Mr. Wippman was vice provost for international relations at Cornell University. He joined Cornell’s faculty in 1992. During a leave, he served as a director in the National Security Council’s Office of Multilateral and Humanitarian Affairs, where he helped develop U.S. policy on war crimes.

Search-committee members praised Mr. Wippman for his publication record, commitment to diversity, and level of engagement, among other qualities.

He will succeed Joan Hinde Stewart, who plans to retire in June, after 13 years as chief. — Ruth Hammond

Next Stanza

Henry S. Bienen, a president emeritus of Northwestern University, has been named president of the Poetry Foundation. He had filled that role in an interim capacity beginning in July.

Mr. Bienen, who led Northwestern from 1995 to 2009, said in a news release that when he was an undergraduate at Cornell University, he had thought poetry might be his vocation. Now he has come back around to it as he leads the foundation, he says, in its mission “to create a more vigorous presence for poetry in the culture.” — Ruth Hammond

Obituary: University Ex-Chief Dies

Robert E.R. Huntley, who was president of Washington and Lee University from 1968 to 1983, died on December 10 in Virginia. He was 86.

When he took the top post, he was only 38 and had recently been named dean of Washington and Lee’s law school after having been a professor of law there for nearly a decade.

Mr. Huntley was leading the university when it had its first African-American law-school graduate, first women enrolled in the law school, and first two African-American bachelor’s-degree recipients. He oversaw changes in the curriculum and a $67-million campaign. — R.H.

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