Cameron Carter named Interim Vice Chancellor for Research

Cameron Carter — a professor in the UC Davis Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and the director of two UC Davis research centers — has been named the interim vice chancellor for the Office of Research.

Carter has held the Endowed Professorship in Schizophrenia Research and served as director of the Schizophrenia Research and Education Program since 2006. He has led the Center for Neuroscience in Davis since 2009 and the Imaging Research Center at the UC Davis Medical Center since 2003. He chaired the Graduate Group in Clinical Research from 2006 to 2009.

Carter officially assumed his new position on Oct. 1. He takes the place of Harris Lewin, who, after serving a five-year term, decided to take up his faculty position and research full time in the Department of Evolution and Ecology and the Genome Center.

Carter first came to UC Davis in 1985 for his residency in psychiatry, after earning his medical degree at the University of Western Australia, and then stayed on for a clinical research fellowship in 1988-89.

He joined the faculty as an assistant professor in 1989 and stayed for four years before going to the University of Pittsburgh and then returned to UC Davis in 2003 as a professor of psychiatry and psychology, and director of the Imaging Research Center.

His campus awards include the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Community Engagement in 2008 and the Dean’s Excellence in Mentoring Award in 2006.

Carter received the Distinguished Investigator Award from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression in 2007. The association twice presented him its Young Investigator Award, in 1994 and 1997. His awards from the National Institute of Mental Health include the Independent Scientist Career Award and Mentored Scientist Development Award for Clinicians.

Carter received the Klerman Award for Outstanding Clinical Research Achievement in 2001 and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Clinical Scientist Award in Translational Research, 2001-06.

His clinical interest is the early diagnosis and treatment of schizophrenia and other cognitive mental disorders. His research focuses on the pathophysiology of disturbances in cognition in mental disorders such as schizophrenia and obsessive compulsive disorder, with the goal of developing more effective therapies that can improve patients’ chances of rehabilitation.

Carter is also involved in the development of new treatments for cognitive disability in schizophrenia and other brain disorders. A key element of the philosophy of his laboratory is that good clinical research can only proceed if it is being constantly informed by ongoing theoretical and methodological progress in basic cognitive neuroscience, and that the experiments of nature provided by clinical brain disorders may provide us with powerful additional insights into the neural basis of normal cognition.