Edgar Garcia-rill PhD

Dr. Garcia-Rill is Director of the Center for Translational Neuroscience, a Center of Biomedical Research Excellence, and a Professor of Neurobiology and Developmental Sciences, and Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS). He was born in Venezuela, and raised in Canada, where he was educated, earning his PhD from McGill University in Montreal in 1973 (Advisor: B. Dubrovsky). After postdoctoral training at the Department of Anatomy at the University of California at Los Angeles and the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA (Advisor: Nat Buchwald), he joined the faculty at UAMS in 1978.

Dr. Garcia-Rill has been continuously funded for his research for over 25 years. His interests include the control of voluntary movement and locomotion, which involves the study of spinal cord injury as well as motor disorders like Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases. He also does research on the control of arousal and sleep-wake cycles, recently describing a novel mechanism for sleep-wake control based on electrical coupling. He is also interested in disorders which manifest sleep dysregulation like schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder, and depression. He is the co-inventor on three patents and collaborates with Law School faculty on a series of law reviews generally titled, "The Law and the Brain: Using science to make legal decisions". Dr. Garcia-Rill has served on NIH review panels for 20 years, and was on the Board of Scientific Councilors for the National Institute for Drug Abuse. He also served on the Executive Office of the President's Office of Science and Technology Policy Forum on Science in the National Interest in 1994. He is Vice President of the Morris Foundation, a philanthropic organization based in Hot Springs, Arkansas.