The Division of Schizophrenia Research (DSR) was established in 2006 as a collaborative effort between Rutgers-University Behavioral Health Care and the Rutgers-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School Department of Psychiatry. The Division was established so as to provide an infrastructure for conducting applied and basic research into the causes and potential treatments for schizophrenia. Since the DSR's inception, faculty and fellows have received over 15 million dollars in grant support, primarily from the National Institute of Mental Health, but also from the New Jersey Division of Mental Health and Addiction Services, NARSAD, the Stanley Medical Research Institute, the American Psychological Foundation, the van Ameringen Foundation, The New England Research Institutes, the Lavelle Fund for the Blind, diaMentis, Inc., Janssen Pharmaceutica, and Astra-Zeneca.
Grant-supported projects have been broad-ranging in topic and methodology. For example, they have investigated: visual, memory, and cognitive control processing impairments in schizophrenia via functional neuroimaging; the longitudinal course of perceptual and cognitive impairments in schizophrenia as a means of predicting clinical outcomes; the effectiveness of cognitive remediation in adults and children with schizophrenia; the effectiveness of visual remediation for schizophrenia; retinal structure and function in severe mental illness using optical coherence tomography and electroretinography, respectively; and medication effectiveness (e.g., pregnenolone; d-Serine; Consta) for enhancing cognitive functioning.
The mission of the Division of Schizophrenia Research is to conduct research on the causes, defining characteristics, and treatments of schizophrenia in the service of developing improved methods of assessment and treatment to improve the lives of people with this condition.