Faculty

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.

AZA Allsop is an artist, neuroscientist, and psychiatrist who conducts research at the intersection of social cognition, music mindfulness, and psychedelics. His research and clinical work is guided by the belief that decoding these tools will provide a better understanding of how social groups function and offer insights into treating mental suffering and enhancing the evolution of society at large. AZA studied Biology, Philosophy, and Jazz Studies at North Carolina Central University, received his MD from Harvard Medical School, PhD in Neuroscience from MIT and was an Emerson Scholar at Berklee College of Music. He completed his residency in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University where he served as co-chief resident of the Clinical Neuroscience Research Unit and completed a certification in psychedelic therapy and research. He is currently an Assistant Professor in Yale’s Department of Psychiatry and Director of the Center for Collective Healing at Howard University. He teaches meditation, yoga, and music and has co-founded several companies that combine arts, science, and community building to drive social change.

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.

I am an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Yale University. My group studies computer architectures and systems for platforms ranging from data center servers to brain-computer interfaces. I am part of Yale's Computer Systems Lab and Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program, and am also a Fellow of Grace Hopper College.Modern computer systems integrate diverse accelerators and memory technologies, offering significant performance but complicating the programming models that software developers are familiar with. We build systems abstractions to improve hardware programmability, and architect hardware and systems software support to implement these abstractions efficiently.We have worked on the virtual memory abstraction with contributions to translation contiguity, memory transistency, and GPU address translation. Our work on coalesced TLBs has been integrated into AMD's chips, and our large page optimizations are now in Linux. Our work on giving GPUs direct access to storage, networking, and memory management services has influenced Radeon Open Compute's hyperscale computing stack. We have also been building heterogeneous architectures that advance the brain sciences to help treat neurological disorders and offer a path towards more explainable and transparent AI. In our HALO project, we are taping out ultra-low-power and flexible chips for brain-computer interfaces and evaluating them using data collected on non-human primates and epilepsy patients.

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.

Thomas Biederer received his Ph.D. in Cell Biology from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. Thomas Biederer then pursued postdoctoral training with Dr. Thomas Südhof at the UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas to investigate mechanisms of synapse formation. He started his research group in 2003 as faculty member at Yale University, was 2013-2019 at Tufts University, and joined the Yale faculty again in 2019. Dr. Biederer’s multidisciplinary research is motivated by his deep-seated interest in the biology of synapses, the cellular structures that connect neurons into networks. His long-term goals are to define how synapses develop, understand their roles in cognition, and investigate the profound disease relevance of synaptic aberrations. Progress from his group is providing insights into trans-synaptic complexes and how they dynamically organize synapse formation and maturation in vitro and in vivo. Attaining these goals is of importance to human health as altered synapse formation and stability underlie devastating brain disorders, including those that are neurodevelopmental diseases and related to drugs of abuse.

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.

Dr. Blumenfeld's clinical and research work focuses on epilepsy, cognition and brain imaging. He directs Yale's Clinical Neuroscience Imaging Center (CNIC), a new multi-disciplinary core facility for innovative study and treatment of brain disorders. Teaching activities include a textbook titled Neuroanatomy Through Clinical Cases, Sinauer Assoc., Publ. 2002, 2010, 2020.

Dr. Angélique Bordey holds the rank of Professor of Neurosurgery, and Cellular & Molecular Physiology. Dr. Bordey is also a Senior Vice-President of Neurosciences at Cassava Sciences, Inc. Dr. Bordey is an active participant in teaching and training of graduate and medical students at Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Bordey is an Editor for several journals and has served on the advisory board of CURE epilepsy, the TSC Alliance preclinical consortium, and on grant review committees, including NIH study sections. Finally, she is a McKnight awardee and holds several federal and foundation grants as well as patents for the treatment of epilepsy.

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.

Joel obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of Alberta, Canada, and his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He received postdoctoral training in the MacKinnon and Ruta Laboratories at The Rockefeller University before joining the Department of Pharmacology at Yale in 2020. As a postdoc, Joel used single-particle cryo-electron microscopy to determine the first high-resolution structure of an olfactory receptor, the insect Orco. At Yale, Joel is continuing to study smell and taste receptors to elucidate the elementary principles of chemosensory detection.

John received an A.B. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Stanford, both in biochemistry. As a postdoc at Stanford he explored “Antigenetics”. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received the Genetics Society of America Medal and the Kornberg-Berg Lifetime Achievement Award in Biomedical Sciences from Stanford University. He was awarded the Yale College Dylan Hixon Prize for Teaching Excellence as well as the Yale College Byrnes/Sewall Teaching Prize. Seventeen of his PhD students have won awards for their dissertations, and he received the Yale Postdoctoral Mentoring Prize. Upon arrival at Yale as an Assistant Professor, John began working on chemoreception in Drosophila. At the time virtually nothing was known about the molecular or cellular basis of olfaction or taste in this organism. Since then his laboratory has made a number of advances in the field, including the discovery of the first insect odor receptors, the discovery of the first insect taste receptors, and the elucidation of basic principles of the logic of odor and taste coding. John’s lab currently studies receptors, neurons, and circuits that underlie olfaction, taste, and pheromone recognition in Drosophila and in insects that transmit global disease.

Sreeganga S. Chandra received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from Purdue University. In her postdoctoral research, she pursued her interest in neuronal cell biology and neurodegeneration in the lab of Thomas C. Südhof at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Departments of Neurology and Neuroscience.

Rui Chang received his B.S. in Biological Sciences and Biotechnology from Tsinghua University, China in 2005. He then studied sensory transduction with Emily Liman and earned his Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the University of Southern California in 2011. He completed his postdoctoral training with Stephen Liberles at Harvard Medical School, where he investigated how body sensory cues are monitored by the brain through the vagus nerve, and how these internal signals regulate whole body physiology. He joined both the Department of Neuroscience and the Department of Cellular and Molecular Physiology at Yale University School of Medicine in January 2018.The Chang lab uses state-of-the-art molecular, genetic, and imaging approaches including single-cell gene expression profiling, virus-based anatomical mapping, in vivo imaging, optogenetics, and chemogenetics to reveal the physiological functions of diverse organ-to-brain circuits. The goal is to better understand the important body-brain interface, and to develop novel neuronal-based therapeutic strategies for disease intervention.

Steve Chang is an Associate Professor of Psychology and of Neuroscience at Yale University. He is a member of the Wu Tsai Institute and the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience at Yale. He is the co-Director of Graduate Studies for Yale's Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program (INP), and the co-Director of Undergraduate Studies for Yale's Neuroscience (NSCI) major. His research aims to understand the neural circuit mechanisms of social cognition and social decision-making. Major research approaches include using naturalistic social interaction paradigms combined with state-of-the-art behavioral and neural technologies. The ultimate goal of the research program is to elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying social cognition and to learn how these processes may be disrupted in psychiatric conditions with social deficits.