Marco Bortolato, associate professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology in the College of Pharmacy is one of four faculty members who have been named Presidential Scholars at the University of Utah.
As the Senior Vice President for Health Science Research Unit, we congratulate Dr. Bortolato in this honor.
The following is excerted from an article published by @TheU by Rebecca Walsh:
Four faculty members—a pharmacologist, a political scientist, an engineer, and a physicist—have been named Presidential Scholars at the University of Utah.
The award recognizes the extraordinary academic accomplishments and promise of mid-career faculty, providing them with financial support to advance their teaching and research work.
“These scholars represent the exceptional research and scholarship of mid-career faculty at the University of Utah,” said Dan Reed, senior vice president for Academic Affairs. “They each are outstanding scholars and teachers in their fields of specialty. Their scholarship is what makes the U such a vibrant and exciting intellectual environment.”
Presidential scholars are selected each year, and the recipients receive $10,000 in annual funding for three years. The program is made possible by a generous donor who is interested in fostering the success of mid-career faculty.
Marco Bortolato
Marco Bortolato, associate professor in the College of Pharmacy, studies the way brain-borne steroids (neurosteroids) can shape how stress exacerbates aggression, tics and impulsivity.
His international research partnerships include teams of basic and clinical scientists in Canada, Germany, France and Italy that are developing novel therapeutic agents, including cannabinoids, to treat pathological aggression, autism-spectrum disorder, Tourette syndrome, schizophrenia and impulse-control disorders like pathological gambling. His multi-disciplinary teams at the U are studying violence in humans and animal models to study therapies for opioid use disorder.
Bortolato’s research group discovered that neurosteroids mediate the role of stress in many neuropsychiatric disorders.
“My goal is understanding how the integration of genetic predisposition and environmental factors—specifically, stress—shapes mental health,” he said. “We are trying to build on these discoveries to develop new drugs to facilitate the implementation of psychological therapies for a wide range of disorders.”
To see the full story, see the post on @TheU.