Gilbert Preston, M.D.
Title: Assistant Professor
Current Position: University of Utah SOM, VAMC MIRECC, Salt Lake City, UT
Education/Training
- B.S. City University of New York 1959-1963
- M.D. State University of New York 1963-1967
- Psychiatry Residency, University of Utah 1999-2002
Certifications
- American Board of Psychiatry & Neurology (Psychiatry), 2004
Honors
- The University of Buffalo Medical School Alumni Foundation Scholarship 1964-1965
- The Avalon Foundation Scholarship 1965-1966
- Dr. Walter Carey Memorial Scholarship 1966-1967
- Kevin P. Finnegan, Ph.D., M.D. Memorial Award for Outstanding Junior Resident, Department of Psychiatry SLC 2000
- Outstanding Performance Award; Clinical Brain Disorders Branch. NIMH, 2002-2004
Publications
- Anderson E, Preston G, Silva C; 2007: Towards development of a circuit based treatment for impaired memory: a multidisciplinary approach. Proceedings of the Third International IEEE-EMBS Conference on Neural Engineering; pp. 302-305; ISBN: 1-4244-0792-3
- Gilbert Preston, Daniel Weinberger; Intermediate phenotypes in schizophrenia: A Selective Review; Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 2005; 7(2):165-79
Academic Activities
- Memory impairment is a crucial feature of several psychiatric disorders. For patients with schizophrenia, it has been recognized for more than a century as the principle obstruction to psychosocial rehabilitation, and independent living. Even so, there is still no effective treatment for memory loss in any neuro-psychiatric illness. Studies have shown that the loss of memory in these disorders is caused by disruption of cellular networks in the brain that process memory. My colleagues and I are working to develop a network based treatment for a network based illness using magnetic stimulation.
- Evidence indicates critical neural circuits mediating attention, language, and working memory are functionally perturbed in schizophrenia. Recent functional genomic studies strongly suggest schizophrenia is, at least in part a disorder of the distributed neural circuits sub-serving cognitive functions such as working memory. There is no treatment for impaired memory, recognized for more than a century as a critical impediment to psychosocial rehabilitation of patients with schizophrenia, and a key feature in the clinical picture of other neuro-psychiatric disoders such as depression, and Parkinson’s disease, for example. In this light, my colleagues and I are working to develop a circuit based treatment for circuit based disorder using trans cranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Additionally, we are working with faculty and graduate students at the university of Utah Department of Computer Science, Scientific Computation and Imaging (SCI) group to develop software for the management and analysis of complex, multimodal datasets such as thoseweare generationg in this interdisciplinary study.
