David Olson, PhD, is the 2021 Young Investigator Award recipient. The award includes a certificate of recognition, a $5,000 honorarium, and an invitation to present a lecture at the Sigma Xi Annual Meeting and Student Research Conference. Olson is being recognized for integrating molecular/cellular neurobiology with the development of chemical tools/probes and being at the cutting edge of neuropsychiatric disease drug discovery.
Olson studied chemistry and biology at Union College before receiving his PhD in chemistry from Stanford University. After his graduate work, he completed postdoctoral training in neuroscience at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Olson joined the faculty at the University of California, Davis in 2015, where he established a research program at the interface of chemistry and neuroscience. His research focuses on understanding how small molecules influence neural plasticity, learning, memory, and mood. In 2019, he co-founded Delix Therapeutics—a company developing non-hallucinogenic analogs of psychedelics for treating a variety of brain disorders.