Endowed Legacy Professorship Established in Psychiatry and Genomics
The Rutgers Board of Governors have approved the Tortora Pato Family Endowed Legacy Professorship, created by a faculty couple at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and Rutgers New Jersey Medical School.
Since their arrival at Rutgers in 2021, distinguished psychiatrists and husband-and-wife Carlos Pato and Michele Tortora Pato have overseen behavioral health, addictions, and genomic psychiatry research, a rapidly growing field in psychiatric medicine that investigates the genetic connections to mental health, at the university.
Carlos—who is executive chair, departments of psychiatry; senior vice president, research, training, and academic affairs at University Behavioral Health Care; and associate director of the Brain Health Institute—and Michele, director of the Center for Psychiatric Health and Genomics, are both professors of psychiatry at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. They are furthering their mission by establishing an endowed professorship that honors their family.
The Rutgers University Board of Governors voted to approve the Tortora Pato Family Endowed Legacy Professorship, which is designed to “honor, retain or recruit faculty in the field of psychiatry and genomics, and alternatively available for the incumbent’s teaching, research and professional activities,” the resolution said.
“Michele and I have devoted our lives to focus on serious mental illness and understanding the biology behind it to define new treatments,” Carlos Pato said. “This is an opportunity to pay it forward and create an avenue that would perpetuate a research focus in psychiatry—and especially genetics.”
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