Roy Sillitoe, Ph.D.

Landis Award for Outstanding Mentorship
Image
Photo of Roy Sillitoe, Ph.D., 2021 NINDS Landis Awardee for Outstanding Mentorship
Institution
Baylor College of Medicine , Houston, TX

Dr. Sillitoe passionately cultivates a diverse and inclusive lab environment, including trainees from different countries and from differing backgrounds and career types. He actively fosters a combination of independent thinking and a collaborative mindset. He focuses on instilling a rigorous approach to research in part by encouraging trainees to view problems as opportunities, not setbacks, and negative findings to be equally informative as positive ones. Trainees uniformly noted the positive and lasting impact that he had on their careers, indicating that they left the lab more motivated to continue in science than when they entered. Dr. Sillitoe's lab aims to determine the developmental mechanisms that are affected after disrupting the functions of disease-linked genes. The long-term goal is to reveal mechanisms that underlie brain disease and perhaps contribute to the discovery of novel therapeutic targets to improve the quality of life in affected individuals.