Sunday, September 05, 2010
Researcher 1 of 7 principal investigators
KYLE GREEN The Roanoke Times
Brooks King-Casas unpacks a box of equipment at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute.
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A researcher who studies how people make decisions in social settings is the first to officially be named a principal investigator at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute.
Brooks King-Casas is in the process of moving his lab and setting up his research home base inside the newly completed institute in Roanoke. He arrived in Roanoke on Tuesday.
King-Casas brings with him research connected to studying post-traumatic stress disorder and mild traumatic brain injury among veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He already has made connections with the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Salem to continue that research.
"They have difficulties with anger and aggression and trying to regulate their emotions in certain social situations," King-Casas said of veterans with PTSD or mild TBI. "Part of what we are doing is using these social interaction tasks [in experiments], to see how the brain makes these kinds of decisions."
King-Casas already has a grant through the Department of Veterans Affairs that he will be transferring to the Salem VA to conduct his research. The renewable three-year grant is worth $250,000 a year and is entering its second year.
The institute has chosen seven principal investigators who will each lead research teams in Roanoke. King-Casas is the only one to be identified so far. The others will likely be revealed this month after details of their departures from their current positions are finalized.
"This is a young man who is a couple of years into his career and already has had some very, very significant discoveries," said Michael Friedlander, executive director of the research institute.
Friedlander recruited King-Casas to Roanoke having previously hired him to work at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Before coming to Roanoke, Friedlander was the chairman of the department of neuroscience and the director of neuroscience initiatives.
King-Casas completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Baylor and was an assistant professor in both the department of neuroscience and the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.
The research institute is an entity of Virginia Tech, and King-Casas has been hired by the university to be an assistant professor in the department of psychology. While he will do work in Blacksburg, he said he will mostly be based in Roanoke.
King-Casas said he will have a research team of between five and 10 people. He said he will bring three or four people with him but is interested in hiring people from the Roanoke community.
"Part of what we do is really community-based," he said. "So it is important for me to work with people in the community that know the community better than I do."
King-Casas did his undergraduate and graduate work at Harvard University.
