Our group just recently got, a year ago, got a center grant looking at child non-OCD anxiety disorders, and what we're doing in that is treating the kids with one of two kinds of psychotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy or a child-centered therapy, sort of a non-directed, Rogerian-type therapy, and then looking at predictors and neural correlates of who responds. So saying can we understand the factors that predict children responding, can we look at how the neurocircuitry changes with response, and learn more about our treatments.

The particular one we have is several different projects with PIs and co-PIs on the projects, and I'm involved at that level, but also, I'm director of the overall center, and my colleague Ronald Dahl is co-director of the overall center. So the fun of a big grant like that is a couple things, one of which is you can just, you get more synergy out of it. I mean, that's the goal of the center grant mechanisms in general, to say if you put several things together is there a real synergy, and certainly in this case, we're doing several different studies in the same kids. So you get considerable synergy in terms of the cost of subject recruitment, which is considerable, and it turns out, of course, that more domains of data in the same kids is more mathematically or statistically useful than this bit in this group of kids and that bit in that group of kids because you can see how they interrelate in the same person. So that is the true advantage of centers, and I think that we capture it in this particular one.

The advantage, or disadvantage, of centers is it's a whole lot of PIs, mid-career, senior-career, relatively junior but up-and-coming investigators all working together, and so that's a whole lot of fun if it's people with interesting ideas that are pleasant to work with, and it could be more challenging if it's people with interesting ideas that don't get along as well. Luckily, in this one and I think in the other things I've been involved with, it's people who've gotten along very well and been strongly interested in the same questions, and it's worked great.