Daniel Wonjae Chung, MD, PhD, and David Lewis, MD, Receive the American Psychiatric Association Kempf Award

Congratulations to Daniel Wonjae Chung, MD, PhD (postdoctoral scholar), who, along with his mentor David Lewis, MD (Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, Thomas Detre Professor of Academic Psychiatry), received the American Psychiatric Association 2024 Kempf Fund Award for Research Development in Psychobiological Psychiatry! The Kempf Award is given to support the career development of a young research psychiatrist working with a senior researcher who has made a significant contribution to research on the causes and treatment of schizophrenia as a researcher and as a mentor.

Dr. Chung conducts research with the Pitt Department of Psychiatry’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)-funded Training in Transformative Discovery in Psychiatry T32 program. He investigates the cortical circuitry of schizophrenia across multiple levels of resolution, ranging from organization of synaptic proteins to synaptic microphysiology and to neural oscillation dynamics. Dr. Chung identifies mechanistic links that integrate his findings by combining postmortem human brain studies with computational modeling, enabling the generation of a multi-scale view of cortical circuit abnormalities in schizophrenia, in order to potentially identify circuit-based therapeutic targets for the core cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia. He has published his research in journals including the American Journal of Psychiatry, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Neuropsychopharmacology.

Dr. Lewis has served as Dr. Chung’s mentor since beginning his MD/PhD at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Lewis is an internationally recognized expert in the neurobiology of schizophrenia, specifically the alterations in cortical neural circuitry that are the core substrate of this illness.

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Chung and Dr. Lewis!