Faculty Spotlight: Deveroux Ferguson, PhD

"My interest in neuroscience developed from a desire to understand consciousness and the self.”

Deveroux Ferguson, PhD, is an assistant professor within the Basic Medical Sciences department at the UA College of Medicine – Phoenix. Dr. Ferguson’s research lab focuses on studying mental illness, depression in particular.

“The essential goal of my lab is to design effective animal models for depression,” he said. “Ultimately, I want to determine what genes might play in the onset of depression and what genes might be responsible for resilience against it.”

The research

“I have a joint appointment with TGen and I would like to come up with a drug design approach to target those genes that underline resilience for depression and design anti-depressants to target that pathway,” Dr. Ferguson said of his research.

Personal experience while growing up motivated Dr. Ferguson to become even more interested in studying depression. “I had some friends who were severely depressed to the point of being somewhat suicidal in high school,” he said. “I think that drove me toward trying to figure out what it is about the brain and exposure to different environmental conditions that can drive someone to such desperate measures.”

“One particular question that led me to pursue the epigenetics of depression is the scenario where identical twins whom share the same genes and experience a similar traumatic event (such as loss of a loved one, divorce, or similarly stress-full traumatic life experience) can lead one of the twins to experience severe clinical depression and yet the other remains resilient and unaffected.”

Outside the lab

Ferguson stressed the importance of having hobbies outside of research. “I like jogging and staying fit,” he said.

“I’m from New York originally so I would go to Central Park every day and jog six miles and right now I’m looking for hiking trails in the Phoenix area. Sometimes it’s hard to find a life outside of research but it’s important to have both a healthy mind and a healthy body. It’s important to have balance.”

The end goal

“Ultimately, by working with my collaborators at Tgen, I would like to use the candidate gene targets obtained from my animal model of depression as the basis for developing potentially novel antidepressants to treat humans with clinical depression.”

Education

Ferguson obtained his undergraduate degree from Hunter College in New York and went on to pursue his doctorate in the department of neuroscience from Stanford University.