Edgar Garcia-Rill

Edgar Garcia-Rill, Ph.D., is Director of the Center for Translational Neuroscience which is funded by the NIGMS IDeA program. He was born in Venezuela, and raised in Canada, where he was educated, earning his Ph.D. from McGill University in Montreal. After postdoctoral training at UCLA, he joined the faculty at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and has been continuously funded for his research for over 40 years and has published over 250 articles and holds 6 patents. He has made major discoveries on spinal cord injury and brainstem control of locomotion that led to the use of deep brain stimulation of the pedunculopontine nucleus for the treatment of Parkinson's disease. His lab has made the two most important discoveries on the reticular activating system in the last 10 years, describing the presence of electrical coupling and of gamma band activity. These discoveries have implications for the treatment of narcolepsy, insomnia, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

His latest book, "Arousal in Neurological and Psychiatric disorders”, deals with the sleep dysregulation present in both neurological and psychiatric disorders that help explain many of the manifestations of these diseases. There is a great need to address the mechanisms that control waking and arousal, and especially how those mechanisms malfunction in specific neurological and psychiatric disorders.

Cambridge Scholars Publishing recently released a new textbook on the subject “Fundamentals of Neuroscience and the Law,” by UAMS neurobiologist Edgar Garcia-Rill, Ph.D., and Erica Beecher-Monas, a lawyer and professor of law at Wayne State University in Detroit who died in 2017.

The book provides insights into the intersection of these two fields, addressing questions such as why courts sometimes dismiss medically sound mental health diagnoses, and how laws could be drafted to be more scientifically based.