Prof Shannon Weickert earned a PhD in Biomedical Science from Mount Sinai Medical School in New York City. She spent the next 11 years in the Intramural Research program at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Washington DC. In 2006, she became a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and in 2017, a Professor of Neuroscience and Physiology at Upstate Medical University, in Syracuse New York. Prof Shannon Weickert is the NSW Chair of Schizophrenia Research and is a National Health and Medical Research Council (Australia) Principal Research Fellow.
For over 30 years, Prof Shannon Weickert has focused her research on determining the biological basis of schizophrenia. She is a molecular biologist and neuroanatomist by training and has used these skills to discover blunted neuronal plasticity, increased neuroinflammation, and hormonal receptor disturbances in the brains of people with schizophrenia. Her expertise as a cellular neurobiologist and experience in cortical histology, anatomical molecular mapping, transcriptomics, and quantitative molecular assays in human brain and blood has led to the identification of an inflammatory biotype of schizophrenia characterized by elevations in cytokines.
Prof Shannon Weickert has made seminal contributions to the conceptualization of schizophrenia as a disorder of neuronal plasticity, and is best known for her pioneering studies on pathways that regulate neocortical growth and maturation in people with schizophrenia (her BDNF paper being cited >500 times). She has led studies that identified the birthplace of neurons in the postnatal human brain and other studies demonstrating that the postnatal recruitment of cortical inhibitory neurons is robust in humans and is likely abnormal in schizophrenia. She leads a translational research program at Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA) aimed at discovering the molecular and cellular underpinnings of schizophrenia in order to translate these discoveries into novel treatments for people with schizophrenia through the design and implementation of investigator initiated clinical trials.
Prof Shannon Weickert has over 234 papers, often publishing in high-ranking journals such as Molecular Psychiatry, Archives of General Psychiatry, Biological Psychiatry, Neuropsychopharmacology, Schizophrenia Bulletin and Journal of Neuroinflammation. She has a total of 15010 cites and an h-index of 70.
In 2015, Prof Shannon Weickert was awarded the competitive Nina Kondelos Prize by the Australian Neuroscience Society, which is awarded to an outstanding female neuroscientist. In 2016 she was awarded the Biological Psychiatry Australia (BPA) Isaac Schweitzer Award. She was also honoured in 2016 by being promoted to Fellow Member of the prestigious American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP).
