With Thanksgiving coming up this week, we would like to thank the many people who have been important to our work on Tourette syndrome and tic disorders here at Washington University.
First, thank you to all of you who have been our patients over the years. You have taught us a great deal not only about tic disorders, but also about persistence, humor, resilience and hope.
A big thank you to all of you who have participated as volunteers in our research studies. Without you, none of it would have been possible. You have allowed us to make progress on a number of fronts, and we are very excited about studies that we are now conducting and studies on the drawing board. I’ll be summarizing some of these in an upcoming post.
Many of you know us primarily through our staff colleagues. Emily Bihun, Samantha Ranck, Nikki Bauer and more recently Vicki Martin are our face to the community. Jon Koller, and more recently Haley Acevedo, do a lot of the scientific heavy lifting. Without Beth Beato I would not get much done. We could not do any of this work without these good folks, and in many ways our work has been better because of their thoughtful input.
A big thanks to the organizations that fund our research, including the National Institutes of Health (your tax dollars at work) and the Tourette Association of America.
Thanks to our mentors, including Joel Perlmutter and Steven Petersen, who (many years ago now!) taught us about patient care and how to conduct worthwhile research.
Thanks to Washington University in St. Louis for providing a supportive and well-equipped home for our work.
And thank you for reading!
Kevin J. Black and Bradley L. Schlaggar
Of course I forgot some very important thank-you’s. Dr. Deanna Greene arrived here 7 years ago for post-doctoral research, after completing her Ph.D. at UCLA, and now is a faculty colleague here at the WU School of Medicine. Dr. Greene has been a leader on our Tourette and New Tic studies for several years now. We are immensely grateful for her skills, her passion for Tourette research, and her delightful personality.
And on December 1, we welcomed a new post-doctoral trainee, Dr. Soyoung Kim, who comes to us from the University of Nottingham in the U.K., where she was already contributing to research on Tourette syndrome. We are very thankful to her, to her previous research mentor, Prof. Stephen Jackson, and (for once) to the vagaries of funding for skilled postdoctoral researchers like Dr. Kim.
Kevin Black