Anne Andrews

Talk Title: Advancing neurochemical monitoring: Implantable and wearable technologies

Anne Milasincic Andrews, Ph.D. is Professor of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences and Chemistry & Biochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a member of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior, the Hatos Center for Neuropharmacology, and the California NanoSystems Institute. Andrews received her B.S. from the Pennsylvania State University and Ph.D. in Chemistry from the American University as a U.S. Department of Education Fellow. She was a pre-doctoral, postdoctoral, and senior staff fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health, where she discovered a novel serotonin neurotoxin, 2’-NH₂-MPTP. She was a member of the team that developed the first serotonin transporter-deficient mouse model.

Andrews is a Fellow of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and past-President of the International Society for Serotonin Research. Among other awards, she has received an NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award, the IUPAC Distinguished Women in Chemistry Award, a California Neurotechnologies Research Award, a Brain and Behavior Research Independent Investigator Award, and an Eli Lilly Outstanding Young Analytical Chemist Award. She was invited to the White House for President Obama’s announcement of the BRAIN Initiative, which she was instrumental in shaping. Her groundbreaking advances lead the BRAIN Initiative technology development and measurements of chemical signaling in the brains of behaving animals.

At UCLA, Andrews leads efforts in basic and translational research on brain chemistry at the nexus of neuroscience and nanoscience. Her interdisciplinary team of chemists, neuroscientists, and engineers seeks to understand how the neurotransmitter serotonin encodes emotionally salient information related to anxiety, mood, and stress responsiveness. Electronic field-effect transistor (FET) sensors, microelectrode voltammetry, and microdialysis methods are developed to investigate neurotransmission at high spatial, temporal, and chemical resolutionin mouse models and psychiatric patient populations to understand the etiology and treatment of anxiety and mood disorders, and to advance personalized predictive medicine. The aptamer-based FET sensors she developed have been applied to wearable stress (cortisol) sensors, phenylalanine sensors for phenylketonuria and biomarkers of other diseases, as well as sensors for DNA, RNA, and single-base variations in DNA.

Andrews is frequently a spokesperson for science, and has been interviewed for CNN, the BBC, Today Show, National Public Radio Weekend Update, and elsewhere. She serves as an American Chemical Society expert, on-call for the media for breaking science news. She served as an editor of ACS Chemical Neuroscience, connecting the neuroscience and chemistry communities. She is a strong promoter of and role model for diversity in science. She is a mentor and role model for women scientists around the world. She advises women scientists on their careers, opportunities, interactions, and more. She was featured among the first four scientists highlighted for the public in the award-winning videos www.acsstories.org(opens in new tab/window); her video Mindshift is shown around the world.