#TraineeTuesday: Sahana Kribakaran, PhD

From the Lab to the Limelight - Blog version of our #TraineeTuesday Twitter series

Welcome Sahana Kribakaran, PhD, this week’s #TraineeTuesday star! In October, this MD/PhD student published a first-author paper and successfully defended her thesis. Let’s dive into her work on childhood trauma and its impact on mental health.

Advised by Dylan Gee, PhD, in the Clinical Affective Neuroscience & Development lab, Sahana examined the link between trauma exposure and the neural mechanisms of safety signal learning (SSL) — a process used to reduce fear in adults. She found neural circuitry involved in SSL was sensitive to trauma exposure.

“Understanding safety signal learning can not only tell us more about the ways in which we learn about threat and safety in our environment, but also has important implications for mental health conditions that often develop following traumatic experiences, such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and anxiety,” Sahana said.

In high school, Sahana read a Scientific American article titled “Faulty Circuits” on the biology of mental disorders. This sparked her fascination with neuroscience, leading her to major in neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles, and conduct circuit neuroscience research. Sahana was interested in the impact of environment and experiences on mental health, and was drawn to Yale’s diversity of research.

The goal of her work is to improve therapeutic approaches to anxiety and PTSD. Throughout graduate and medical school, Sahana thought critically about how trauma is beyond the individual and “most often a product of our society’s systems.” To her, the ways we care for one another must shift.

She is thankful for the “truly incredible people” here who have become “life-long friends,” including peers met through community organizing efforts. Sahana loves the following quote from activist and author Kai Cheng Thom:

“I think the major difference between a social justice and a white/colonial lens on trauma is the assumption that trauma recovery is the reclamation of safety–that safety is a resource that is simply ‘out there’ for the taking and all we need to do is work hard enough at therapy. Colonial psychology and psychiatry reveal their allegiance to the status quo in their approach to trauma: That resourcing must come from within oneself rather than from the collective. That trauma recovery is feeling safe in society, when in fact society is the source of trauma.” (Kai Cheng Thom, 2019)