Psychatric Illnesses and Addiction

Nii Addy is the Albert E. Kent Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Associate Professor of Cellular and Molecular Physiology and the Director of Faculty Development and Collaborative Excellence. He is also Director of the Faculty Mentoring Program for the Minority Organization for Retention and Expansion (MORE) and former co-chair of the Career Development Subcommittee of the ARCH Task Force in the Yale Department of Psychiatry. He contributes to graduate student and postdoctoral training and to mentorship and sponsorship initiatives through his efforts on campus and in scientific societies. He received his B.S. in Biology from Duke University and his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Yale University. Dr. Addy directs a federally funded research program investigating cholinergic, dopaminergic and L-type calcium channel mechanisms mediating substance use and mood disorders. Dr. Addy’s team also studies the ability of tobacco product flavor additives to alter nicotine use behavior and addiction. He serves on the journal editorial board of Neuropsychopharmacology, Biological Psychiatry, and Neuropharmacology, and he previously served as a grant reviewer for the Neurobiology of Motivated Behavior (NMB) Study Section of the National Institutes of Health's Center for Scientific Review (CSR). In addition to his campus work, Dr. Addy hosts the Addy Hour podcast, discussing topics at the intersection of neuroscience, mental health, faith, and culture. Episodes include dynamic conversations based on the lived experience and professional expertise of his guests - which include community leaders, clinicians and mental health experts, scientists, professional athletes and entertainers, faith leaders, and mental health advocates. As the creator and host of town hall community events, Dr. Addy has also built unique partnerships to encourage and equip audiences to embrace the use of holistic, integrated tools to address mental health challenges. He has collaborated with Lecrae (Grammy Award-winning artist and NY Times Best Seller), Doug Middleton (Jacksonville Jaguars/ Dream the Impossible Initiative), Allan Houston (former NBA All-Star, NY Knicks/ FISLL Project), the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), the Veritas Forum, the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA), the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT), the Yale University Chaplain's Office, Yale Well, the Salvation Army, Every Nation Church NYC, the American Bible Society and others. His research and community work have been featured by National Public Radio (NPR), Newsday, the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA), The Source Magazine, Chuck Norris, BoldTV, Legitimate Matters, and Relevant Magazine. He has presented scientific lectures at universities throughout the United States and Europe, and he serves on the Board of Trustees for The Carver Project, aimed at empowering and connecting individuals across university, church and society.

Dr. Arnsten is an international expert on the molecular regulation of higher cortical circuits, and a member of the National Academy of Medicine. She received her B.A. in Neuroscience from Brown University in 1976 (where she created the Neuroscience major), and her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from UCSD in 1981. She did post-doctoral research with Dr. Susan Iversen at Cambridge University in the UK, and with Dr. Patricia Goldman-Rakic at Yale. Dr. Arnsten's research examines the neural basis of higher cognition. Her work has revealed that the newly evolved cortical circuits that underlie higher cognition are uniquely regulated at the molecular level, conferring vulnerability in mental illness and age-related cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer's Disease. Arnsten's research has led to new treatments for cognitive disorders in humans, including the successful translation of guanfacine (IntunivTM) for the treatment of ADHD and related prefrontal cortical disorders.

The Bhattacharyya Lab studies molecular mechanism of kinase signaling, especially in the context of learning, memory and neuropathological conditions. Dr. Bhattacharyya received her PhD in Computational Biophysics at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore where she used molecular dynamics simulations and graph theory to study allosteric communication in proteins and its complexes with RNA/DNA. She made a transition into experimental biology during her postdoctoral studies at the University of California Berkeley as a Human Frontier Science Program Long Term Fellow. She used structural biology, single-molecule microscopy, and native mass spectrometry along with computational techniques to study the molecular mechanism of regulation in a calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase that is critical for learning and memory. The Bhattacharyya Lab takes an integrative approach to understand the molecular mechanism of cellular signaling using both experimental and computational techniques.

Dr. Hilary Patricia Blumberg is 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. She graduated summa cum laude in neuroscience from Harvard University and completed her medical degree, psychiatry training and specialty training in brain scanning research at Cornell University Medical College. Dr. Blumberg’s research is devoted to understanding the brain circuitry differences that underlie mood disorders across the lifespan, with a focus on bipolar disorder and on suicide prevention. She directs the Mood Disorders Research Program at Yale that brings together a multi-disciplinary group of scientists to study the genetic, developmental and environmental factors that cause mood disorders to develop new methods for early detection, more effective interventions, and prevention of the disorders and their associated high risk for suicide. This research includes the use of new state-of-the-art brain scanning methods. The program is also known for training young scientists to be new leaders in the field. Dr. Blumberg has served as principal investigator on awards from the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute on Drug Abuse, Department of Veterans Affairs, BD2, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, International Bipolar Disorder Foundation, For the Love of Travis Foundation, MQ Foundation, Stanley Medical Research Institute and Women’s Health Research at Yale. She has received numerous awards including the 2021 International Society of Bipolar Disorders Mogens Schou Award for Research in Bipolar Disorder, 2021 Sethi Award, 2018 American Psychiatric Association Blanche F. Ittleson Award for outstanding and published research in child and adolescent psychiatry and 2017 Brain and Behavior Foundation Colvin Prize for Research Achievement in Mood Disorders. She is a fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology and a member of the Society of Biological Psychiatry.

Kristen Brennand, PhD is the Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor of Psychiatry and Professor of Genetics at Yale University School of Medicine. She first established her independent laboratory in the Pamela Sklar Division of Psychiatric Genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in 2012, after having completed post-doctoral training at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and PhD studies at Harvard University. Dr. Brennand’s research combines expertise in genomic engineering, neuroscience, and stem cells, to identify the mechanisms that underlie brain disease. Her focus lies in resolving the convergence of, and complex interplay between, the many risk variants linked to disease, towards the goal of facilitating the clinical translation of genetic findings.  Dr. Brennand’s work is funded by the National Institutes of Health, the New York Stem Cell Foundation, the Brain Research Foundation, and the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation.

Dr. Che joined the faculty of Yale Department of Psychiatry in 2021, after completing her postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Natalia De Marco García at Weill Cornell Medical College and Dr. Gord Fishell at NYU. She earned a Ph.D. in Physiology and Neurobiology in the laboratory of Dr. Joseph LoTurco at the University of Connecticut in 2014. She received a B.S. triple-majoring in Biology, Physics and Physical Chemistry at Pacific Lutheran University in Washington state in 2009.

Dr. Youngsun T. Cho is an Assistant Professor in the Child Study Center and Department of Psychiatry at Yale University. She is a child, adolescent and adult psychiatrist. She holds an MD/PhD degree from the University of Rochester, and completed dissertation work on amygdala neuroanatomy and reward processing using fMRI. She completed psychiatry residency in the Neuroscience Research Training Program (NRTP) at Yale, and a child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship at the Yale Child Study Center. Her current research focuses on the development of cognitive and motivational brain circuits in adolescents with depression and adolescents with schizophrenia using fMRI, and pharmacologic neuroimaging to identify mechanisms of potential treatments. Her work is funded by the NIMH, and the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation.

Dr. Constable received his PhD in Medical Physics from the University of Toronto. He came to Yale as a postdoctoral fellow and has been here since. In addition to being the director of MRI in the Yale Magnetic Resonance Research Center, he runs two parallel labs. One lab is a neuroscience lab focused on mapping the functional organization of the brain through functional MRI measurements and understanding the relationship between this functional organization and behavior. Such developments are leading to new approaches to functionally phenotype individuals with applications in subtyping in brain disorders and disease. Dr. Constable's other lab is focused on the development of novel MRI devices with projects around low field MRI's that can be placed in doctor's offices, with the potential to make MRI much more accessible than it is in it's current form.

Dr. Philip Robert Corlett trained in Experimental Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychiatry with Professors Trevor Robbins and Paul Fletcher at the University of Cambridge. He won a Wellcome Trust Prize Studentship and completed his PhD on the brain bases of delusion formation in the Brain Mapping Unit, Department of Psychiatry. After a short postdoc, he was awarded the University of Cambridge Parke- Davis Exchange Fellowship in Biomedical Sciences which brought him to the Yale University Department of Psychiatry to explore the maintenance of delusions with Professors Jane Taylor and John Krystal. He was named a Rising Star and Future Opinion Leader by Pharmaceutical Marketing Magazine and joined the Yale faculty in 2011 where he will continue to explore the cognitive and biological mechanisms of delusional beliefs as well as predictive learning, habit formation and addiction.

Dr. Cosgrove uses neuroreceptor imaging techniques such as PET to gain insights into the brains of people with substance use and other stress-related disorders. Trained as a clinical psychologist who worked with individuals managing alcohol and drug use disorders, Dr. Cosgrove transitioned to conducting research in order to inform the treatment of substance use disorders. Her laboratory develops and applies innovative brain imaging paradigms to track changes in critical neurochemicals over time, to identify treatment targets for psychiatric disorders, and to examine individual and sex and gender differences.

Irina Esterlis is a clinical neuropsychologist and neuroreceptor imager with extensive training in the application of SPECT and PET to the study of mood, trauma, suicide, and comorbid disorders. Dr. Esterlis has developed two novel paradigms to interrogate both the acetylcholine and glutamatergic systems in vivo in human. Her lab was also the first to show ketamine-induced changes in human volunteers in vivo. She has received awards from Society of Nuclear Medicine, American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, Society for Biological Psychiatry, and American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Esterlis' current work includes the study of the metabotropic glutamatergic receptor involvement in bipolar depression and suicide, and synaptic alterations associated with depression, aging, and suicidality. The lab has expanded to add in vivo preclinical work to elucidate human findings.

Dr. Fineberg holds an MD PhD from the University of Iowa, where she studied the molecular mechanisms that control early fate decisions for neural stem cells in mouse brain.  She initially became interested in science as an undergraduate student at Oberlin College in physiology classes, where mechanism came alive in narratives about the evolutionary and individual history of the organism. She came to Yale in 2010 to pursue clinical and research training in psychiatry.  Her current research engages  both stories and brain-based mechanisms of mental illness, asking questions about how patient social experiences relate to neural circuits and learning mechanisms.Dr. Fineberg has been awarded young investigator grants from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention to pursue studies about social learning in Borderline Personality Disorder.

Dr. Matt Girgenti is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine. He is a neuroscientist and molecular biologist and a member of the Division of Molecular Psychiatry and the Wu Tsai Institute at Yale. He is also a VA-NCPTSD Research Scientist at the West Haven VA Medical Center. He received his doctoral degree at the University of Connecticut in molecular neuroscience. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship in Molecular Psychiatry at Yale followed by a VA Career Development fellowship in postmortem brain genomics. His early research focused on the epigenetic basis of schizophrenia using neural stem cells to demonstrate a role for the SCZ-risk gene ZNF804a as a gene transcription regulator. During his postdoc, his research focused on the cell-type-specific effects of rapid antidepressants, including ketamine and scopolamine using pharmacogenomic approaches. During his VA Career Development fellowship he worked on human postmortem studies focused on the functional genomics of neuropsychiatric disorders, specifically PTSD and major depression. He published the first genome-wide transcriptomic study of the human PTSD brain (Girgenti MJ, et al. 2021). His research now focuses on genomic studies of the postmortem human brain, combining molecular biology and bioinformatics to understand the neurobiology of major brain and behavioral disorders, including depression, PTSD, and alcohol use disorder.

Dr. Goldfarb is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology and member of the Wu Tsai Institute. She completed her PhD in Psychology: Cognition & Perception with Dr. Elizabeth Phelps at New York University and a postdoctoral fellowship in the Departments of Diagnostic Radiology and Psychiatry with Dr. Rajita Sinha at Yale. Her research investigates different forms of learning and memory, how stress changes which parts of our experiences we remember, and the impact of memory on later behavior.

Dr. Xiaosi Gu is Professor of Psychiatry and Biomedical Informatics & Data Science, and Director of the Computational Psychiatry Unit at Yale School of Medicine. She received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, followed by postdoctoral training at Virginia Tech and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London. A recipient of the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), Dr. Gu is internationally recognized for her research in the field of computational psychiatry, which seeks to understand how humans form beliefs and make decisions and how these processes break down in psychiatric disorders such as addiction, depression, autism, amongst others. Continuously funded by NIH and private foundations, her work integrates computational modeling, cognitive neuroscience, neuroimaging, and human intracranial recording methods. Dr. Gu has published widely in leading scientific journals such as Nature Mental Health, Nature Human Behavior, JAMA Psychiatry, PNAS, amongst many others. She is a Co-Director for the Society for Computational Psychiatry, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Computational Psychiatry, and a Reviewing Editor at eLife. Dr. Gu was the organizer for the London Computational Psychiatry Course, which was a precursor to the Computational Psychiatry Conference, where she is currently a Steering Committee Member. Dr. Gu has also served as a member of the NIMH Board of Scientific Counselors, a Scientific Advisor to the Wellcome Trust and Simon’s Foundation, Co-President of the Society for Computational Psychiatry, and a grant reviewer for numerous organizations such as the NIH, NSF, the Wellcome Trust, Medical Research Council (UK), and DFG (Germany). Outside the lab, Dr. Gu is a dedicated advocate for mental health awareness, regularly speaking at public forums including a TEDx talk in 2018.

After completing an undergraduate degree in Computing Science at the University of Alberta, Dr. Hampson did her graduate work in Boston University's Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems, a department focused on computational neural network models of brain systems. She came to Yale as a postdoc to pursue her interests in human functional neuroimaging. During her postdoc, Dr. Hampson conducted some of the earliest studies of resting-state functional connectivity, validating the technique and relating resting-state functional connectivity measures to behavioral variables. Later, she turned her focus to using real-time fMRI neurofeedback for training people to control their brain activity patterns. She is interested in novel functional neuroimaging techniques and psychiatric applications of these techniques.

Dr. Laura Huckins is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry. She received her masters in BioEngineering from Imperial College London in 2011, and her PhD in Molecular Biology and Psychiatric Genetics from the University of Cambridge in 2015. Her research focuses primarily on studying psychiatric disorders, with an emphasis on eating disorders and PTSD, as well as development and application of multi-omic methods to interpret the functional consequences of GWAS variants. Her lab focuses particularly on Eating Disorders and PTSD; to this end, she is co-chair of the PGC Eating Disorders working group.Dr. Huckins' work is funded by the Klarman Family Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Karim Ibrahim is an Assistant Professor at the Yale Child Study Center. His translational neuroscience research focuses on the impact of early life stress, environmental factors, and problematic digital media use on neurodevelopment and youth mental health. His work also examines emotion regulation in youth mental health through brain imaging approaches. Dr. Karim Ibrahim’s research is interdisciplinary and integrates multimodal imaging including functional and structural MRI, machine learning, and network neuroscience approaches to identify robust brain biomarkers relevant to child mental health with clinical applications. His research also investigates dynamics of the functional connectome and the neural response to treatment in youth. His recent interests lie in leveraging computational neuroscience methods to understand the impact of social media use and content on executive functioning and emotion regulation in youth, and the link to mental health conditions in children and adolescents. As a licensed clinical child psychologist, he also has extensive experience in developmental psychopathology, including assessments and cognitive-behavioral interventions for autism spectrum disorder, mood, anxiety, and disruptive behavior . He is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Development and Psychopathology, and Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.

Dr. Kaffman is a physician-scientist who works as a psychiatrist at the Newington VA, where he treats a large number of veterans with PTSD. He also has a basic neuroscience lab at Yale, where he studies the impact of early life adversity (ELA) on neurodevelopment and complex behavior in mice. Dr. Kaffman is a Principal Investigator on several NIH-funded grants that integrate molecular/cellular, genomic, pharmacological, and behavioral approaches with imaging techniques such as resting state fMRI and high-resolution dMRI conducted in rodents. This translational approach allows for a direct comparison between findings in rodents and human studies. The objective of this translational research is to elucidate the impact of early adversity on the neurodevelopment of circuits that regulate psychiatrically relevant behaviors, and to utilize this knowledge in the development of novel diagnostic and treatment modalities.