By Jamie Seaton
"Being named a Bowes Biomedical Investigator is such an honor because it allows me to really take risks,” said UCSF Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences faculty member and research scientist Anna Victoria Molofsky, MD, PhD.
Collectively, neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases are leading causes of illness, disability and premature death worldwide. And while they are categorized separately, they have much in common.
Similarly, Anna Victoria Molofsky, MD, PhD, who studies neuropsychiatric diseases, and Martin Kampmann, PhD, who studies neurodegenerative diseases, have different focuses, but their work overlaps, and they often collaborate. So, it’s fitting that both Kampmann and Molofsky are 2025 recipients of the Bowes Biomedical Investigator award.
The award is made possible by the William K. Bowes Jr. Foundation and supports scientists who take novel approaches and have the potential to make significant contributions to biomedicine. Recipients receive $1.25 million over five years.
Molofsky, the Samuel Barondes Professor of Neurobiology and Psychiatry and an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, has always been drawn to things that people consider unimportant. When she set up her own UC San Francisco lab in 2015, Molofsky was contemplating areas that she felt were being ignored in brain research, including how the brain and the immune system communicate.
The Molofsky Lab is doing innovative research to define how the immune system impacts the brain. Its scientists also are researching the links between immune function and neurological and psychiatric disorders, including post-viral neurological syndromes. Their latest discoveries are bringing them one step closer to developing new treatments for neuropsychiatric diseases.
“Being named a Bowes Biomedical Investigator is such an honor because it allows me to really take risks to try a kind of science that might not have payoffs for many years, and to venture in new directions,” Molofsky says.
Can therapies for cancer also be used for psychiatric disease?
Her family immigrated to the U.S. from Brazil when Molofsky was a child. She fell in love with science at the University of Michigan, where her research in stem cell research sparked a fascination with the brain’s regenerative abilities. This led her to pursue a PhD in stem cell biology and specialize in psychiatry.
While she was in medical school, Molofsky met her now-husband, immunologist Ari Molofsky, MD, PhD. In 2007, the couple joined UCSF because “it has one of the best neuroscience programs in the country, with people studying brain diseases at the highest level, and one of the leading immunology programs in the country,” Anna Victoria Molofsky says. (Ari Molofsky is now a professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine.)
After Molofsky completed her psychiatry residency at UCSF, she pursued postdoc work studying glial cells with David Rowitch, MD, PhD, a professor in the Department of Pediatrics. Later, when she set up her own lab, researchers were using antibody therapies developed from immune molecules to treat and cure diseases, including cancer and rheumatoid arthritis. Molofsky wondered why these therapies weren’t being applied to psychiatric diseases as well.
“If we can understand how these immune molecules influence the brain, maybe we can harness them for therapeutic benefit,” she says.
The physician-scientist stresses that her work is not done in isolation.
“UCSF is just a phenomenal place for collaborative research,” Molofsky says. “It’s expected that you’ll work together, and all of the work that I’ve done has relied on collaborations.” She added that she is collaborating with Kampmann, the other 2025 Bowes Biomedical Investigator, on a study of human cells. (For information about Kampmann's research endeavors, visit the UCSF News website.)
Anna Victoria Molofsky, MD, PhD, confers in the lab with Research Associate Sarah Wang (left).
Three far-reaching discoveries
Molofsky’s collaborations with her husband’s lab have led to three discoveries with far-reaching implications.
The first is that the immune signal interleukin-33, a well-known contributor to asthma, is necessary for the brain to develop its synaptic connections and to form memories.
Anna Molofsky’s lab also has shown that this molecule helps prevent Alzheimer’s disease symptoms in a mouse model.
The second is that another immune signal, interleukin-13, helps inhibitory synapses form in the brain. Molofsky believes that if more of those kinds of synapses are encouraged to form, it might lead to treatments for developmental diseases such as epilepsy.
Molofsky is particularly excited about the third discovery: that interferon, the immune signal that’s stimulated in the body with a virus such as a cold or influenza, plays a role in brain development.
As a practicing psychiatrist, Molofsky hopes her work ultimately leads to cures that can help reverse the course of psychiatric diseases such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism and depression. In the meantime, she focuses on the here and now.
“You can’t predict where your work is ultimately going to lead,” Molofsky says. “I think the only way to do good science is to have a goal somewhere in your mind – but to be totally immersed in what you’re doing at the moment.”
About UCSF Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
The UCSF Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute are among the nation's foremost resources in the fields of child, adolescent, adult, and geriatric mental health. Together they constitute one of the largest departments in the UCSF School of Medicine and the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, with a focus on providing unparalleled patient care, conducting impactful research, training the next generation of behavioral health leaders, and advancing diversity, health equity, and community across the field.
UCSF Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences conducts its clinical, educational, and research efforts at a variety of locations in Northern California, including the UCSF Nancy Friend Pritzker Psychiatry Building; UCSF Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital; UCSF Health medical centers and community hospitals across San Francisco; UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland; Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center; the San Francisco VA Health Care System; UCSF Fresno; and numerous community-based sites around the San Francisco Bay Area.
About the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences
The UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, established by the extraordinary generosity of Joan and Sanford I. "Sandy" Weill, brings together world-class researchers with top-ranked physicians to solve some of the most complex challenges in the human brain.
The UCSF Weill Institute leverages UCSF’s unrivaled bench-to-bedside excellence in the neurosciences. It unites three UCSF departments—Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Neurology, and Neurological Surgery—that are highly esteemed for both patient care and research, as well as the Neuroscience Graduate Program, a cross-disciplinary alliance of nearly 100 UCSF faculty members from 15 basic-science departments, as well as the UCSF Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases, a multidisciplinary research center focused on finding effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and other neurodegenerative disorders.
About UCSF
The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is exclusively focused on the health sciences and is dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. UCSF Health, which serves as UCSF’s primary academic medical center, includes top-ranked specialty hospitals and other clinical programs, and has affiliations throughout the Bay Area.
