Anne B Young is an American physician and neuroscientist who works on neurodegenerative diseases. She is the only person to have been president of both the international Society for Neuroscience and the American Neurological Association.
Young did her undergraduate studies at Vassar College. She was awarded a M.D. and Ph.D. in Pharmacology from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and completed residency training in neurology at the University of California San Francisco.
Her research career includes many highlights. In 1974 she published a paper correlating the excitatory action of granule cells and the neurophysiological effect of glutamic acid, to suggest that glutamate is the primary neurotransmitter of the granule cell.[1] Today glutamate is considered to be the chief excitatory neurotransmitter in the human central nervous system. Additionally, a 1989 paper she co-authored describing an anatomically-derived model of basal ganglia disorders has been cited over 2000 times.[2] She was the president of the Society for Neuroscience from 2003–2004 and was also the president of the American Neurological Association. She is currently a Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School.