Dr. John Lauriello is the Chancellor's Chair of Excellence in Psychiatry and medical director of the Missouri Psychiatric Center. He specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of psychotic disorders, most notably schizophrenia. Before joining MU to lead its psychiatry department in 2009, Dr. Lauriello served as professor and vice chair of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico. He directed the UNM Schizophrenia Research Group, which focuses on clinical trials and neuroimaging. He was executive medical director of the UNM Psychiatric Center for nearly a decade, and he served as a UNM site principal investigator for the Mental Illness and Neuroscience Discovery (MIND) Institute, a consortium of universities, schools of medicine, brain research institutions and laboratories in Minnesota, Massachusetts and New Mexico. MIND and the National Institutes of Health have provided continuous and significant funding for Dr. Lauriello's research. The NIH awarded an $11.6 million grant to the Mind Research Network to develop a center he directed for studying the neural mechanisms of schizophrenia. He has served as principal investigator for that project as well as other studies involving atypical antipsychotic therapies, biomedical informatics, imaging and neurochemistry. A graduate of Yale University in New Haven, Conn., Dr. Lauriello completed medical school at Temple University in Philadelphia. In 2011, Temple University School of Medicine presented him with its highest alumni honor, the Drs. M. Page and Henry Laughlin Alumnus of the Year Award. Dr. Lauriello completed residency at New York Presbyterian Hospital's Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, followed by fellowships focused on psychopharmacology and psychobiology at Stanford University and the University of San Diego in California. He had been with the University of New Mexico since 1994.