Collaborators

Dr. John Krystal is the Robert L. McNeil Jr. Professor of Translational Research; Chair, Department of Psychiatry; Chief of Psychiatry, Yale-New Haven Hospital; Director: NIAAA Center for the Translational Neuroscience of Alcoholism; Director, Clinical Neuroscience Division, VA National Center for PTSD; Director, VA Alcohol Research Center; Medical Director, Schizophrenia Biological Research Center, DVA Dr. Krystal is a leading expert in the areas of alcoholism, schizophrenia, and post-traumatic stress disorders. His work links psychopharmacology, neuroimaging, and molecular genetics to study the neurobiology and to develop novel treatments for these disorders. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He also serves in a variety of advisory and review capacities for NIAAA, NIMH, Wellcome Trust, Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, and the Karolinska Institutet. He previously served on the National Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism Advisory Council (NIAAA), the Department of Defense Psychological Health Advisory Committee, the NIMH Board of Scientific Counselors (chair, 2005-2007), and American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (president, 2012). Dr. Krystal also edits the journal, Biological Psychiatry (impact factor: 8.3).

Dr. David Glahn is the Director of the Affective Disorders and Psychosis Trials Imaging, Neuropsychology & Genetics Laboratory, Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center. Dr. Glahn is an Associate Professor, in the Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine. Dr. David Glahn joined the Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center, Institute of Living, and the Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine in October of 2008. He received his doctorate in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000 and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). From 2002 until 2008, Glahn was part of the Department of Psychiatry and the Research Imaging Center, University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio. Glahn’s research focuses on elucidating the neurobiological roots of major mental illnesses through the integration of cognitive neuropsychological, functional and structural neuroimaging, and behavioral and molecular genetic approaches. The ultimate goals of this research is the identification of genes involved in affective and psychotic illnesses as well as genes that influence non-pathological brain structure and function. Localization of genes involved in mental illness should significantly contribute to an understanding of the underlying biology of these complex diseases, which in turn should improve future treatments and create the potential for prevention strategies.

Dr. Godfrey Pearlson is a Professor of Psychiatry and of Neurobiology. Dr. Pearlson's medical training was in the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in England.  Following this he completed a graduate degree in philosophy at Columbia University in New York and was successively a resident, postdoctoral fellow and faculty member at Johns Hopkins University Department of Psychiatry under Dr. Paul McHugh, where he was ultimately Professor of Psychiatry and founding director of the division of Psychiatry Neuroimaging. Dr. Pearlson is currently founding director of the Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center, a 50-person organization consisting of 4 component labs. The Center specializes in the translational neuroscience of major mental illness, including dementias, mood disorders, substance abuse, schizophrenia and psychotic bipolar disorder, PTSD, autism and other conditions spanning childhood to old age. The center includes two 3-Tesla research-dedicated MRI scanners and scans over 1200 individuals annually, all of whom are genotyped. It also specializes in the importation of virtual reality (VR) paradigms into the functional MRI environment to yield ecologically valid "virtual environments" to study complex behaviors in the scanner such as automobile driving. Dr. Pearlson's research uses neuroimaging as a tool to address a broader array of questions regarding the neurobiology of major mental disorders, primarily psychosis and substance abuse.  Important "firsts" include showing that structural and functional brain changes associated with schizophrenia can also occur in psychotic bipolar disorder, the relationship of structural and functional abnormalities in the superior temporal gyrus  with hallucinations in schizophrenia, using VR to explore complex behaviors in the MRI scanner (or example simulated driving) to assess disruptive effects of abused substances and the first demonstration of human in-vivo cocaine-mediated dopamine release using PET ligands. Dr. Pearlson is a current NIMH MERIT awardee and holds six R01 grants from NIAAA, NIDA and NIMH. He has been awarded a NARSAD distinguished investigator award and a Michael visiting professorship from the Weizmann Institute.  He is published ~275 peer-reviewed research articles.  He is also co-founder of the annual BrainDance competition for high school and college students across New England.  These competitive awards encourage students to gain knowledge about psychiatric diseases and to develop a more tolerant and realistic perspective towards people with severe psychiatric problems.

Dr. Christopher Pittenger is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, in the Child Study Center and of Psychology; Director, Yale OCD Research Clinic; Associate Director, Neuroscience Research Training Program. Dr. Pittenger earned his MD and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University, where his graduate work was done with recent Nobel Prize recipient Eric Kandel. He returned to Yale University - where had done his undergraduate studies - for residency and research training in psychiatry in 2003, and he joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor in 2007. During his Ph.D. studies in basic neurobiology, he became fascinated by the brain's ability to go on autopilot -- to perform complex series of actions or thoughts, after sufficient rehearsal, with almost no conscious effort. Then, during his clinical training, he became more and more aware of how this process, when disrupted by disease processes, could lead to the maladaptive and disruptive automaticity seen in many neurpsychiatric disorders.  His research, both with patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder and in animal models, aims to elucidate the mechanisms of learned automatic behaviors and to better understand the consequences when they go awry, with the ultimate goal of developing new understandings and better treatments for a variety of neuropsychiatric conditions. Dr. Pittenger's research and clinical work have been acknowledged by a number of prestigious awards, including grant funding from the National Institutes of Health, NARSAD, the Tourette Syndrome of America, and the Doris Duke Charitable Trust, and awards from the National Institute of Mental Health, the Society for Neuroscience, the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, the American Psychiatric association, and the American College of Psychiatrists.

Dr. Michael Cole is a postdoctoral associate at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on discovering the cognitive and neural mechanisms that make human behavior uniquely flexible and intelligent. His research focuses on two broad themes. 1) Brain network mechanisms of flexible cognitive control: Flexible control – a capacity supporting adaptive, goal-directed behavior important in daily life – is affected in a variety of mental illnesses, markedly reducing quality of life. See Cole & Schneider (2007) for evidence that flexible control is implemented by a set of integrated brain regions sometimes referred to as the cognitive control network. See Cole, Pathak, et al. (2010) and Cole, Yarkoni, et al. (2012) for evidence that this network implements control via its high connectivity throughout the brain, as indexed by global brain connectivity (GBC). See Cole, Anticevic, et al. (2011) for a recent demonstration of how a breakdown in the GBC of a core node of this network may contribute to the profound cognitive control deficits associated with schizophrenia. 2) Rapid instructed task learning (RITL; "rittle") : A key aspect of flexible control is our ability to rapidly reconfigure our minds to perform a nearly infinite variety of possible tasks. For instance, you utilized RITL the first time you used a cell phone – transfering what you knew about 'land line' phones while expanding what was possible with such a device. Comprehensive understanding of this ability would have important implications for research in education, aging, and a variety of mental illnesses. See Cole, Bagic, et al. (2010) for a novel cognitive paradigm for investigating RITL, as well as evidence that RITL involves a specific shift in dynamics within prefrontal cortex. See Cole, Etzel, et al. (2011) for evidence that RITL is possible due to rapid transfer of practiced task rule representations within prefrontal cortex to novel contexts. See Cole, Laurent, & Stocco (2013) for a review of RITL findings and an integrative theory of how prefrontal cortex may implement RITL abilities and cognitive flexibility generally.

Dr. Grega Repovs graduated in Psychology at Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana in 1996. He was offered a position the same year as instructor in General psychology. In 1999 successfully completed masters thesis Semantic memory and visual attention in schizophrenia at Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. In 2002 Successfuly defended Ph.D. dissertation titled: "Computational model of attentional deficits in schizophrenia". Dr. Repovs subsequently joined the Cognitive Control and Psychopathology Lab at Department of Psychology, Washington University in Saint Louis, USA as postdoctoral research fellow where he trained in functional connectivity approches to study large scale neural systems via non-invasive neuroimaging. His main research interest are centered on cognitive neuroscience broadly, where he is striving to combine classical behavioral research with findings provided by computational science, neuroscience with modern methods of brain imaging, and cognitive neuropsychology and neuropsychiatry. His specific interests are in study of attention and cognitive control, working memory, semantic memory. His other research topics include spatial cognition and cognitive maps, crisis management and leadership, psychological consequences of coping with stress, cognitive theories of self and social reality.

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. Peter Morgan is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry; Associate Director, Cocaine Research Clinic; Medical Director, Forensic Drug Diversion Clinic; President, Medical and Professional Staff of Connecticut Mental Health Center. Dr. Morgan is interested in the neurophysiology of substance dependence for its own sake and as a window into understanding cognition and behavior. The major focus of his laboratory is the examination of the role of disturbances of sleep and sleep-dependent memory consolidation in chronic substance use and other mental illnesses. His laboratory has found that abstinent male cocaine users suffer from an "occult" insomnia. Although their sleep is objectively poor and they exhibit cognitive disruptions related to this poor sleep, they believe that their sleep is unimpaired. Recent findings suggest that modafinil, a wakefulness promoting agent, reverses some of the sleep deficits associated with chronic cocaine use.