Jeanne Leventhal Alexander, MD, and Mark von Zastrow, MD, PhD, have been selected as this year’s recipients of the Dr. J. Elliot Royer Award for outstanding contributions to psychiatry. The award was established by Oakland physician J. Elliott Royer after his death in 1962. His will specified the eligibility criteria, selection process, and amount of the annual award, which alternates each year between neurology and psychiatry.
Alexander, tapped for the Royer Award for community-based practitioners, was a clinical faculty member at UCSF from 1982-1994, as well as serving appointments at NYU Medical Center and the Stanford School of Medicine. She has been in private practice since 2009, following a 24-year career with Kaiser Permanente and 14 years as director of the organization’s Psychiatry Women’s Health Program for Northern California. She is the president and founder of the Alexander Foundation for Women’s Health, and has been recognized numerous times both nationally and internationally for her efforts to promote public understanding and awareness of the psychiatric aspects of women’s health.
Von Zastrow, recipient of the Royer Award for academic excellence, has been a faculty member at UCSF since 1992 and is the Friends of Langley Porter Endowed Chair for Research in Schizophrenia and Depression, the associate director of the UCSF Center for Neurobiology and Psychiatry and director of the UCSF PIBS/Tetrad Program in Cell Biology. In the words of his nominators, von Zastrow is “a world-class scientist who has made many contributions to our understanding of cellular responses to neurotransmitters and psychoactive drugs” and “one of the very best scientists in our department and at UCSF.” He received his award at last month’s departmental Research Retreat.
