Gary Westbrook, MD

Pandas Network

Gary Westbrook, MD received medical training and did graduate study in Biomedical Engineering at Case Western Reserve University. Following residencies in internal medicine and neurology in Boston and St. Louis, he worked in basic neuroscience at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. Currently, he is a senior scientist at the Vollum Institute in Portland and the Dixon Professor of Neurology in the OHSU School of Medicine. Dr. Westbrook has been the recipient of a Jacob Javits Award and a Merit Award from the National Institutes of Health and is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine. He is a past editor-in-chief of the Journal of Neuroscience and now serves as a senior editor at eLife. He has served on the Advisory Council of the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke (NINDS). Most of the work in his lab focuses on the mouse entorhinal-dentate circuit that is the entry pathway for information arriving in the hippocampus. These pathways differentially signal the “what, when, and where” of information entering the hippocampus, which is critical for learning and memory. In a new project, his lab developed a novel mouse model of anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis to investigate key questions regarding this autoimmune disorder and potentially test treatment strategies.