By JOYCE THOMAS

Judith M. Ford, PhD, was promoted to professor (research) of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. She pioneered combined use of electroencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to study neurophysiological and neuroanatomical abnormalities in schizophrenics. Currently she is doing brain imaging studies using event-related potentials, diffusion tensor imaging and fMRI techniques to understand auditory hallucinations, which occur in 75 percent of people with schizophrenia.

She is principal investigator of a five-year National Institute of Mental Health career development award on the neurobiology of response monitoring failure in schizophrenia. She is on the review board of the Center for Scientific Review (brain disorders and clinical neurosciences) and recipient of the Senior Scientist Award (2002, 2004) from the biennial workshop on schizophrenia, held in Davos, Switzerland.

Ford received her PhD in neurosciences from Stanford in 1975 and served as a postdoctoral scholar at Langley Porter Institute, UCSF, conducting research at the Palo Alto VA. In 1989 she joined Stanford as senior research associate and received a faculty appointment in 1994.

M. Peter Marinkovich, MD, was promoted to associate professor of dermatology, with tenure. He studies the biological role of extracellular matrix proteins in the basement membrane zone, or BMZ, which anchors the epidermis and the dermis of the skin.

He showed that a certain BMZ protein, called laminin-5, undergoes processing and binds to collagen type VII. The absence of this binding in inherited blistering diseases such as epidermolysis bullosa provides the basis for considering gene therapy for EB. He also demonstrated that another protein, laminin-10, is essential for hair development.

In addition he generated a panel of monoclonal antibodies against proteins in the BMZ and pioneered their use to diagnose dermatologic diseases.

He is an investigator with the Program in Epithelial Biology and director of the Blistering Disease Clinic at Stanford. He received his MD from St. Louis University in 1988. After an internship in internal medicine with UCSF, he completed a research fellowship at Shriners Hospital, Portland, Ore., and a dermatology residency at Oregon Health Sciences University. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1995.

William I. Weis, PhD, was promoted to professor of structural biology and of molecular and cellular physiology. Weis received tenure in 1999 as an associate professor. He also has an appointment at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory.

Weis studies the molecular basis of processes involved in the establishment and maintenance of cell and tissue structure. His research focuses on four areas: the architecture and dynamics of intercellular junctions; signaling pathways that govern cell fate determination, specifically the Wnt pathway; the mechanisms by which the compartmentalized structure of cells is maintained by the movement of membranes between regions of the cell; and the interactions between proteins and carbohydrates on opposing cell surfaces. The Wnt pathway is significant because its inappropriate activation is a hallmark of many cancers.

He co-organized the 2002 and 2004 Keystone Symposia: Frontiers in Structural Biology. At Stanford he directs the Graduate Program in Biophysics. He received his PhD in biochemistry from Harvard in 1988 and conducted postdoctoral work at Yale and Columbia before joining the Stanford faculty in 1993.