Area of Study / Keywords

https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=xWSW12kAAAAJ&hl=en

About

Serdar Dursun is a psychiatrist who also holds a PhD in psychopharmacology. He is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Alberta and has a clinical practice and is a Consulting and Admitting Psychiatrist in Edmonton at the Grey Nuns Community Hospital. He does clinical teaching to medical students and psychiatry residents and is also involved in mentoring and examination of graduate students. Dr. Dursun has been involved in education programs for psychiatrists at provincial, national and international levels. He has served in diverse administrative roles in the Department of Psychiatry, including Director, International Fellowship Program and Co-Director, Computational Psychiatry Program.

Nationally, he has given service to various CIHR committees including being an External Reviewer for the COVID-19 and Behavioral Sciences 2 (BS2) Committees. He is a Member of the University of Alberta’s Women and Children's Health Research Institute (WCHRI) and the AI4Society, Faculty of Science, Computing Science. 

Dr. Dursun is a Past President and currently a member of the Executive Board of the Alberta Psychiatric Association (APA), with the additional duty of being the Chair (North) of the Scientific Committee of APA.

Internationally, he is a Fellow, of the National Neuroscience and Mental Health Institute, Brazil.

Research

Dr. Dursun's research focus is in the areas of neuropsychopharmacology and biological psychiatry, and he is well recognized internationally for his innovative research. Over the course of 25 years, he has addressed a significant problem in psychiatry, namely treatment-resistant schizophrenia, using novel interventions including glycine, D-serine, lamotrigine, minocycline and related anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant strategies. He has made significant contributions in both preclinical and clinical research, moving with ease from animal models to patients. His contributions have the potential to improve the lives of patients who are not responding and who may have significant negative symptoms. HIs major research contributions have been in the area of the “glutamate-NMDA receptor-nitric oxide-cGMP” signaling pathway. He is continuing his exciting research through his work on using machine learning techniques to analyze neuroimaging data from patients with schizophrenia. Dr. Dursun was also one of the experts chosen to contribute to the International Consensus Guidelines on Diagnosis and Terminology in Treatment-Resistant Schizophrenia published in 2017 in the American Journal of Psychiatry (174: 216-229). In terms of addiction psychiatry, he contributes to addiction services, and was co-holder of a major CIHR-affiliated international grant with German, Spanish and Finnish researchers (TRANSALC) to investigate and understand mechanisms which could lead to future novel therapeutics for alcohol use disorders. He has started on research to address the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on opioid use disorder, and this work has resulted in several international peer-reviewed publications.   

 Dr. Dursun has supervised or co-supervised numerous graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and psychiatry residents in research projects during his career and has had major national and international research funding including from CIHR, Brain Canada and the Stanley Foundation. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers and made presentations at many provincial, national and international conferences. His h-index and i10-index are 50 and 143 respectively (Google Scholar, see link below). 

For a list of many of Dr. Dursun's publications, please check PubMed.  

https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=xWSW12kAAAAJ&hl=en