Directory

Robert Lemelson, Ph.D. is an Anthropologist and documentary film maker who received his M.A. from the University of Chicago and his doctoral degree from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He serves as a research anthropologist at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, and as an assistant adjunct professor in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA.

As an anthropologist and documentary film maker, Dr. Lemelson’s work centers on culture, personal experience, and mental illness in Indonesia and in the United States. He has been creating documentary films in Indonesia since 1997, focusing on the relationship between culture and disorders including obsessive-compulsive disorder, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), schizophrenia, and Tourette’s syndrome. In 2007 he founded Elemental Productions, an ethnographic documentary film production company.

In addition, Dr. Lemelson is the founder and president of the Foundation for Psychocultural Research, a non-profit foundation supporting research and training in neuroscience and the social sciences. He also serves as a director of the Lemelson Foundation, promoting innovation of socially beneficial and sustainable technologies to meet basic human needs in countries around the world.

In 2007, Dr. Lemelson began the Lemelson/Society for Psychological Anthropology (SPA) student fellows and conference funds program. The program works to encourage graduate students to pursue fieldwork in psychological anthropology and to support faculty conferences fostering new and creative ideas in psychological anthropology.

Dr. London received her Ph.D. in Pharmacology from the University of Maryland and her postdoctoral training at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Before coming to UCLA in 2001, she was the Director of the Brain Imaging Center for the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and held faculty appointments at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins Schools of Medicine. Dr. London is a Professor-in-Residence in the Departments of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and Molecular and Medical Pharmacology. Her work focuses on the use of neuroimaging to study neural circuitry underlying self-control and behaviors related to addiction.

Sheng-Xing Ma is a Professor and Director of Integrated Medicine Research Laboratories at Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. He was recruited to UCLA as an Assistant Professor in 1996, and he received a promotion to Associate Professor in 2003 and Professor in 2008 in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine and Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. Dr. Ma has been engaged in the studies of nitrate pharmacology, biochemistry and physiological effects of nitric oxide (NO) for the past 20 years. He has demonstrated that nitroglycerin modifies neuronal excitability, increases norepinephrine release/synthesis in heart and brain, and stimulates noradrenergic activation in the posterior hypothalamus, which contributes to nitrate tolerance and central cardiovascular effects of the drug. Results from his group have found that NO mediates acupuncture-induced cardiovascular and analgesic effects through a novel pathway, the dorsal medullar-thalamic tract. Another novel discovery is that NO-cGMP related biomolecules contribute to biochemical physiological changes in acupoints associated with meridian practices and diseases. He has developed a painless, non-invasive device to biocapture NO, cGMP, and nitrotyrosine from skin surface of acupoints and meridians for studies of signal transduction molecules during physiological and pathological changes, and therapies such as acupuncture, moxibustion, and meditation/Qi Gon.

Dr. Juan Carlos Marvizón is Assistant Professor at the Division of Digestive Diseases, Department of Medicine, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.Dr. Marvizón was born in 1957 in Rome, Italy. He majored in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain). He received his Ph.D. in 1985 for his work on the glycine receptor at the Severo Ochoa Center of Molecular Biology in Madrid. During 1985, he worked as a research scientist at Pharmuka Laboratoires, a pharmaceutical company in Paris, France, investigating peripheral benzodiazepine receptors. He was then awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to work at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, where he studied the biochemistry of glycine and GABA receptors in relation to stress, and later became interested in NMDA receptors. From 1989 to 1991, he was faculty at the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain). Prior to coming to UCLA, he was Research Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, where he worked with Dr. Michel Baudry on the role of NMDA receptors in learning and memory. Dr. Marvizón came to UCLA in 1994. His current research focuses on the role of NMDA, substance P and opioid receptors in pain. He is the principal investigators of a grant from the NIH to study the release of substance P and opioids in the spinal cord.

Selected References:

Marvizon JCG, Grady EF, Stefani E, Bunnett NW, Mayer EA. Substance P release in the dorsal horn assessed by receptor internalization: NMDA receptors counteract a tonic inhibition by GABAB receptors. Eur. J. Neurosci. 11:417-426, 1999.

Marvizon JCG, Wang X, Matsuka Y, Neubert JK and Spigelman I. Relationship between capsaicin-evoked substance P release and NK1 receptor internalization in the rat dorsal horn. Neuroscience 118: 535-545, 2003.
Lao LJ., Song B and Marvizon JCG. Neurokinin release produced by capsaicin acting on the central terminals and axons of primary afferents: relationship with NMDA and GABAB receptors. Neuroscience 121: 667-680, 2003.

Song B and Marvizon JCG. Peptidases prevent m-opioid receptor internalization in dorsal horn neurons by endogenously released opioids. J. Neurosci. 23: 1847-1858, 2003.

Song B and Marvizón JCG. Dorsal horn neurons firing at high frequency, but not primary afferents, release opioid peptides that produce m-opioid receptor internalization in the rat spinal cord. J. Neurosci. 23: 9171-9184, 2003.