Dr. Ceylan Isgor

Each year our University Research Committee selects and awards FAU faculty for outstanding research, scholarly, and creative contributions. The recipients are selected by their peers and the awards are presented at the academic ranks of Full Professor, Associate Professor and Assistant Professor in two categories: sponsored and project-oriented research; and creative and scholarly activities research. Each of these outstanding researchers will receive not only a plaque, but also a substantial check in recognition of their efforts. The "Researchers and Creative Scholars of the Year" were recognized at the Honors Convocation on April 8.

This year, Dr. Ceylan Isgor, Assistant Professor of the Basic Science Department at the Charles E. Schmidt College of Biomedical Science has been awarded the prestigious Researcher of the Year Award for FAU.

Shortly after coming to FAU, she developed a research program studying individual differences in stress responsiveness in a rodent model of human sensation-seeking called the "novelty seeking phenotype." Using this unique model, Dr. Isgor aims to capture normally-occurring individual differences in emotional conditions including psychostimulant addiction. She has collected behavioral and molecular data to show that the novelty-seeking phenotype can indeed predict nicotine craving and can identify neurobiological differences between individuals who have high versus low vulnerability to develop addiction.

Dr. Isgor is the recipient of a New Investigator grant from the Florida Department of Health (FDOH) as the PI to study potential drug targets to neutralize the neurobiological differences that are antecedents to nicotine relapse in the vulnerable phenotype. She has expanded her research into a Team Science Project to include two of her colleagues, Dr. Keith Brew and Dr. Vijaya Iragavarpu in the College of Biomedical Science to investigate if the novelty-seeking phenotype can predict distinct responses to nicotine in the system. Last year, they received $820,000 from the FDOH for this project. Dr. Isgor currently has three graduate students in her laboratory who are paid through these grants.

Together with a colleague, she has also developed a graduate course in molecular neuropsychopharmacology which she has taught for two years. Last year, she received a College "Level Excellence of Graduate Teaching" for the success of her graduate course.