Sacramento researcher elected to National Academy of Medicine for work at UC Davis
The prestigious National Academy of Medicine announced Monday that a member of the Sacramento medical community, researcher David Amaral, has been elected to the group — one of the highest honors in health and medicine.
Amaral becomes the 13th faculty member from the University of California, Davis, to secure membership in the august group. He already earned a distinguished professorship at UCD and holds the endowed Beneto Foundation Chair in the MIND Institute and in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. He was the MIND Institute’s founding research director.
Although there are more than 1 million physicians in the United States, the National Academy of Medicine is made up of little more than 2,200 people. Current members select new people who come not only from the nation’s body of physicians and health care professionals, but also from such fields as law, engineering, social sciences and the humanities.
“This is a well-deserved honor for David,” said John Morrison, director of the UC Davis California National Primate Research Center who was elected to the Academy in 2016. “David has been one of the country’s leading neuro-anatomists for decades, and perhaps more importantly, he has applied those skills and insights to the understanding of autism from the perspective of neural circuitry. The MIND Institute at UC Davis is one of the leading centers for autism research in the country, and David has been a major contributor to the extraordinary work carried out at the MIND Institute.”
In the past 20 years, Amaral has focused his research on understanding the biological bases of autism spectrum disorder. In the Autism Phenome Project, he takes a comprehensive and multidisciplinary approach to analysis of children with autism. He also uses postmortem brain tissue for autism research as director of Autism BrainNet.
Amaral spent the early part of his career at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, joining UC Davis in 1995. Besides his work at UCD, he also directs the National Institutes of Health Autism Center of Excellence which provides innovative and targeted autism treatments, and in 2016, he was appointed to the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee by the secretary of Health and Human Services.
He has held many other national leadership positions in autism research organizations and published more than 300 papers. He also edits a national autism journal.
Of his appointment, Amaral said: “I look forward to working with my colleagues in the National Academy of Medicine to increase research and education about autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders and to foster more enlightened treatment of people with autism and their caregivers.”
Other California institutions also had faculty or staff elected to the academy, including four from UC San Francisco, three from Stanford University, two from UC Los Angeles, one from UC San Diego, one from UC Irvine, one from the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital in Los Angeles and one from City of Hope in Duarte.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this story identified David Amaral as a psychiatrist.
This story was originally published October 22, 2019 at 5:30 AM.
