Sarah Yip, PhD

My work uses neuropsychiatric research methods to identify the biological mechanisms of addictions and other psychiatric disorders. This work has been funded by the UK’s Medical Research Council, Beijing Normal University, the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, NIDA and NIAAA. My ongoing work uses advanced neuroimaging analysis methods (e.g., connectome-based predictive modeling, independent component analysis) to assess large-scale systems dynamics within the context of addictions and their treatments. This includes application of machine learning approaches to identify predictive neuromarkers of cocaine and opioid use, respectively, as well as collection of neuroimaging data from individuals receiving different forms of medication-assisted treatments for opioid-use disorder and pharmacological challenge studies of opioid medications in healthy controls. This work has also recently expanded to include predictive modeling of neuroimaging data from three large developmental cohorts (together comprising data from >3,000 individuals) in order to identify neuromarkers of alcohol initiation and misuse.