Julie A. Blendy, Ph.D., is Professor and Vice-Chair  of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She was trained in Zoology /Biology (BS) at the University of Maryland  and was a student worker at NIMH where she became fascinated with neuropsychiatric illness and its cellular basis. She received her PhD in Pharmacology at Georgetown University School of Medicine and pursued post-doctoral research first at  Johns Hopkins University in the Department of Biological Chemistry and at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg where she was an early adaptor of  gene targeting and generation of knock-out mice. Dr. Blendy  has combined her skills  in neuropharmacology, molecular biology, and mouse genetics to identify mechanisms underlying the pathology and treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders such as depression and drug addiction. She has developed a number of unique mouse line with human SNPs that can be used to identify novel targets for therapeutic development. She has been continually funded by NIH grants since 1999, has served on NIDA Scientific Council and has received multiple awards for teaching and mentoring over the course of her career.