The Gerald L. Klerman Award is the highest honor that DBSA gives to members of the scientific community. Presented each year, this award recognizes researchers whose work advances knowledge of the causes, diagnosis, and treatment of depression and bipolar disorder. Awards are given annually in each of the following two categories: DBSA Gerald L. Klerman Award, Senior Investigator, and DBSA Gerald L. Klerman Award, Young Investigator. Learn more about Gerald L. Klerman.
Dr. Hilary Blumberg | 2025 Senior Investigator Award
Hilary P. Blumberg, MD is a psychiatrist, the John and Hope Furth Professor of Psychiatric Neuroscience, Professor of Psychiatry, Radiology and Biomedical Imaging and in the Child Center, and Director of the Mood Disorders Research Program, at the Yale School of Medicine. Her work is devoted to understanding the causes of mood disorder and related disorders and of suicide risk across the lifespan and generating new early detection and intervention approaches. Her research program focuses on translational investigative approaches integrating multimodal neuroimaging research with genetic, stem cell, behavioral and clinical trial research to identify brain circuitry differences and generate strategies to target them for early detection, interventions, and prevention. She leads international neuroimaging efforts to study bipolar and other mood disorders and suicide risk from childhood to older adulthood. She has published many seminal papers on bipolar disorder and suicide prevention, and she has received numerous awards, including the International Society of Bipolar Disorders Mogens Schou Award for Research in Bipolar Disorder, Brain and Behavior Research Foundation Colvin Prize for research in mood disorders, American Psychiatric Association Blanche F. Ittleson Award for research in children and adolescents, and American College of Physicians Award for mood disorders. She studied neuroscience as an undergraduate at Harvard University graduating summa cum laude, and completed her medical degree, and psychiatry and specialty training in neuroimaging, at Cornell University Medical College prior to joining Yale’s faculty in 1998.
Dr. Roy Perlis | 2025 Senior Investigator Award
Roy Perlis, MD MSc is Associate Chief for Research and Ronald I. Dozoretz, MD Endowed Chair in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he also directs the hospital-wide Center for Quantitative Health. He is a Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. The Perlis lab pioneered the application of emerging artificial intelligence (AI) methods to improve patient care in psychiatry, opening the door to truly personalized medicine by using electronic health records for understanding the course of mood disorders. Applying these kinds of methods to biobanks allowed his group and collaborators to identify the first risk genes for major depression and for treatment-resistant depression. In 2010 Dr. Perlis was awarded DBSA’s Gerald L. Klerman Young Investigator Award; he is proud to serve as a scientific advisor to the DBSA.
Dr. Sarah Sperry | 2025 Young Investigator Award
Sarah H. Sperry, PhD, is the Richard Tam Early Career Professor of Translational Bipolar Research in the Department of Psychiatry and a Faculty Associate in Psychology at the University of Michigan (UM). Dr. Sperry graduated cum laude from Tufts University with a B.S. in clinical psychology in 2011. She obtained her Ph.D. in clinical psychology in 2020 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining UM, she completed her clinical internship at the Medical University of South Carolina/Charleston VAMC in 2020 and postdoctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in 2021. At the UM, Dr. Sperry directs the Emotion and Temporal Dynamics (EmoTe) Lab and serves as the Associate Director of the Heinz C. Prechter Bipolar Research Program. Her research focuses on identifying behavioral and neural indicators of affective and cognitive dysregulation in bipolar disorder, predictors of the development and clinical course of bipolar disorders (e.g., circadian dysrhythmia, alcohol and cannabis use), and how to use digital technologies to personalize assessment and treatment for individuals living with bipolar disorders.
See a list of past Gerald L. Klerman Award Winners
DBSA Thanks the 2025 Gerald L. Klerman Sponsors
