Paul Garris Named Illinois State University Distinguished Professor

Illinois State University President Al Bowman has appointed Paul Garris, School of Biological Sciences, as a Distinguished Professor at Illinois State.

The Distinguished Professor designation honors faculty members of distinction who have demonstrated to the broader community that excellence is the foundation of the University. Among the criteria for appointment are achieving national recognition for scholarly research, creative production or leadership in creative or scholarly activities. In addition, candidates must have been clearly identified by students, colleagues or external agencies as an outstanding teacher or must have contributed significant public service in accord with his or her academic discipline.

Distinguished Professors are invited to deliver one public lecture or presentation on a topic of their choosing, receive a $1,000 budget per annum in support of activities as a Distinguished Professor and continue to hold the title throughout their service to Illinois State.

Garris came to Illinois State in 1996 after earning his doctorate in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at Indiana University School of Medicine and completing a five-year postdoctoral research associate position at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Garris' research on dopamine neurons, which serve an important role in mediating the brain's functions from control of movement and emotions to cognition, has earned national and international recognition.  Specifically, Garris' research has questioned the mainstream view that dopamine is a "pleasure chemical" in the brain, but posited that it is a learning signal associating rewards to predictive cues.  That view of dopamine neurons received international recognition through the publication of the research in Nature, the top journal across science disciplines.  Garris has also established research programs on Parkinson's disease, the mechanism by which the drugs are prone to abuse, and the development of instrumentation to support fast-scan cyclic voltammetry to monitor brain neurochemistry.

Charles B. Blaha, director of the Division of Experimental Psychology at the University of Memphis, said that Garris "contributions to the development of neurochemical instrumentation for recording neurotransmitter release during deep brain stimulation in human neuropsychiatric patients has been critical for the consortium and has laid the essential groundwork for our future studies in advancing our understanding of neurochemical mechanisms underlying this interventive neurosurgical approach.  To be more direct, I can count only a few innovative contributions to the advancement over the last two decades.  Dr. Garris without question qualifies as one of them."

Garris has earned many accolades and honors.  Some include being named a Kuffler and Steinbach Fellow at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Ma., and giving invited presentations for national meetings and at prestigious institutions such as Stanford University; for the international conference on In Vivo Methods: Monitoring Molecules in Neuroscience in Sweden; and for the international conference on In Vivo Methods: Monitoring Molecules in Neuroscience in Belgium.

Garris has published 63 refereed journal articles and book chapters in such top journals as the Journal of Neuroscience, Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, along with 80 conference abstracts.

As principal investigator, Garris' research program has been supported with more than $3 million in external funding from such agencies as the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the American Heart Association. As co-investigator, his research collaborations have been supported by $2.7 million in federal funding.

Garris has served as a grant reviewer panelist for the National Science Foundation as well as a grant reviewer for the National Institutes of Health, the Welcome Trust and the Health Research Board. He has been instrumental in teaching and mentoring students during his career, including two postdoctoral fellows, seven Ph.D. students, nine masters' students and more than 50 undergraduate students.