Trainees

Nicholas is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychiatry conducting research with Dr. Hedy Kober. Before coming to Yale, Nicholas completed his PhD at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with Dr. Maital Neta. He is interested in leveraging functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to characterize multivariate patterns of brain connectivity associated with clinically relevant outcomes (e.g., relapse in substance use disorders) in the service of improving treatments. He is also interested in the brain basis of mindfulness-based interventions for a range of pathologies.

Dr. Keisha Smith is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Yale Stress Center, Yale School of Medicine working primarily with Dr. Rajita Sinha. She earned her Ph.D., in Biomedical Sciences with emphasis in Neuroscience, at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, TN in 2019 under Tutul Nayyar. Dr. Smith investigated how the use of hormonal contraceptives may correlate with the development of depressive symptoms. She found that women using progesterone-only contraceptives had reduced beta-arrestin1 levels and higher depressive symptoms, as well as elevated plasma levels of IL-1β. Currently, Dr. Smith research focuses on using neuroimaging to evaluate the brain’s response to different hormonal processes on stress and addiction as well as sex differences as a way to study, prevent, diagnose, and treat mood disorders such as stress and anxiety in substance use disorders.