Anne B. Young

Anne Buckingham Young is an American physician and neuroscientist who works on neurodegenerative diseases. She is the only person to have been president of both the international Society for Neuroscience and the American Neurological Association.

Education

Young grew up in a North Shore suburb of Chicago and attended prep school.^[1] She did her undergraduate studies at Vassar College. She was awarded a M.D. and Ph.D. in Pharmacology from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and completed residency training in neurology at the University of California San Francisco.

Professional career

Her research career includes many highlights. In 1974 she published a paper correlating the excitatory action of granule cells and the neurophysiological effect of glutamic acid, to suggest that glutamate is the primary neurotransmitter of the granule cell.^[2] Today glutamate is considered to be the chief excitatory neurotransmitter in the human central nervous system. Additionally, a 1989 paper she co-authored describing an anatomically derived model of basal ganglia disorders has been cited over 2000 times.^[3]

In 1991 Young was appointed chief of neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Julianne Dorn Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. She was the first woman service chief in the hospital's 180 year history.^[1] She was the president of the Society for Neuroscience from 2003 to 2004 and was also the president of the American Neurological Association. She is currently a Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School.

References

1. Thomas, Patricia (May 2002). "Brainy Women". Harvard Magazine.
2. "Glutamic acid: selective depletion by viral induced granule cell loss in hamster cerebellum," PMID 4152168.
3. "The functional anatomy of basal ganglia disorders," PMID 2479133