Banu Gumusoglu, PhD, a University of Iowa postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Iowa Neuroscience Institute, has won a 2023 Young Investigator Award from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation.

The two-year, $70,000 grants help promising young scientists launch careers in neuroscience and psychiatry, supporting either extended research fellowship training or starting a research lab as a junior faculty member.  

Gumusoglu, a 2020 graduate of the UI Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Neuroscience, is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the laboratories of Mark Santillan, MD, PhD, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology, and Donna Santillan, PhD, research associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology. She studies interacting mechanisms of psychiatric and obstetric risk in both mothers and children. This award will support her work evaluating maternal brain accommodation to pregnancy, and mechanisms of depression onset in pregnancy and postpartum.

Gumusoglu’s research is also funded by a Next Generation Pregnancy Initiative Award from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and by the American Heart Association.