Neuropharmacology

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.

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.

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.

Dr. Che joined the faculty of Yale Department of Psychiatry in 2021, after completing her postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Natalia De Marco García at Weill Cornell Medical College and Dr. Gord Fishell at NYU. She earned a Ph.D. in Physiology and Neurobiology in the laboratory of Dr. Joseph LoTurco at the University of Connecticut in 2014. She received a B.S. triple-majoring in Biology, Physics and Physical Chemistry at Pacific Lutheran University in Washington state in 2009.

Dr. Youngsun T. Cho is an Assistant Professor in the Child Study Center and Department of Psychiatry at Yale University. She is a child, adolescent and adult psychiatrist. She holds an MD/PhD degree from the University of Rochester, and completed dissertation work on amygdala neuroanatomy and reward processing using fMRI. She completed psychiatry residency in the Neuroscience Research Training Program (NRTP) at Yale, and a child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship at the Yale Child Study Center. Her current research focuses on the development of cognitive and motivational brain circuits in adolescents with depression and adolescents with schizophrenia using fMRI, and pharmacologic neuroimaging to identify mechanisms of potential treatments. Her work is funded by the NIMH, and the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation.

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. Cosgrove uses neuroreceptor imaging techniques such as PET to gain insights into the brains of people with substance use and other stress-related disorders. Trained as a clinical psychologist who worked with individuals managing alcohol and drug use disorders, Dr. Cosgrove transitioned to conducting research in order to inform the treatment of substance use disorders. Her laboratory develops and applies innovative brain imaging paradigms to track changes in critical neurochemicals over time, to identify treatment targets for psychiatric disorders, and to examine individual and sex and gender differences.

Dr. Fineberg holds an MD PhD from the University of Iowa, where she studied the molecular mechanisms that control early fate decisions for neural stem cells in mouse brain.  She initially became interested in science as an undergraduate student at Oberlin College in physiology classes, where mechanism came alive in narratives about the evolutionary and individual history of the organism. She came to Yale in 2010 to pursue clinical and research training in psychiatry.  Her current research engages  both stories and brain-based mechanisms of mental illness, asking questions about how patient social experiences relate to neural circuits and learning mechanisms.Dr. Fineberg has been awarded young investigator grants from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention to pursue studies about social learning in Borderline Personality Disorder.

Dr. Matt Girgenti is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine. He is a neuroscientist and molecular biologist and a member of the Division of Molecular Psychiatry and the Wu Tsai Institute at Yale. He is also a VA-NCPTSD Research Scientist at the West Haven VA Medical Center. He received his doctoral degree at the University of Connecticut in molecular neuroscience. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship in Molecular Psychiatry at Yale followed by a VA Career Development fellowship in postmortem brain genomics. His early research focused on the epigenetic basis of schizophrenia using neural stem cells to demonstrate a role for the SCZ-risk gene ZNF804a as a gene transcription regulator. During his postdoc, his research focused on the cell-type-specific effects of rapid antidepressants, including ketamine and scopolamine using pharmacogenomic approaches. During his VA Career Development fellowship he worked on human postmortem studies focused on the functional genomics of neuropsychiatric disorders, specifically PTSD and major depression. He published the first genome-wide transcriptomic study of the human PTSD brain (Girgenti MJ, et al. 2021). His research now focuses on genomic studies of the postmortem human brain, combining molecular biology and bioinformatics to understand the neurobiology of major brain and behavioral disorders, including depression, PTSD, and alcohol use disorder.

Ellen J. Hoffman, M.D., Ph.D. was appointed as Assistant Professor in the Child Study Center in July 2015. Ellen is a child psychiatrist, psychiatric geneticist and neurobiologist, and a graduate of the Investigative Medicine PhD Program at Yale, who specializes in the functional analysis of genes in neurodevelopmental disorders. The Hoffman laboratory conducts translational research aimed at understanding the biological mechanisms underlying autism spectrum disorders and discovering new pharmacological treatments. Ellen's research focuses on investigating the function of genes that are strongly associated with autism to determine how disruption of these genes alters brain development and the neural circuits underlying simple behaviors. The long-term goal of her research is to use this gene-based approach to identify relevant biological pathways and novel pharmacological treatments that target these pathways. Ellen also works clinically as a child psychiatrist and as an attending supervising Yale child psychiatry fellows.

Elizabeth Jonas received training in Neurology and Internal Medicine. She developed an interest in Neuroscience while studying as a medical student with Dr. Rodolfo Llinas at N.Y.U. and at the Marine Biological Laboratory. With Dr. Llinas she developed an interest in calcium control of synaptic transmission. She pursued this interest as a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Leonard Kaczmarek, Yale Pharmacology. Dr. Jonas developed a technique for recording from ion channels on intracellular membranes and has used this and other techniques to study mitochondria. Mitochondria are necessary for life and death of neurons and other cells. Regulation of mitochondrial metabolism is also key to energy efficiency in the nervous system. Dr. Jonas is now studying the role of mitochondria and energy efficiency in neurodegenerative disease states and in learning and memory formation in healthy brain. Her lab has recently characterized the molecular identity of the cell death channel known as the mitochondrial permeability transition pore and is now studying how inhibiting gating of the pore may ameliorate stroke, neurodegenerative and developmental brain diseases.

Dr. Kaczmarek carried out his undergraduate and graduate work at the University of London. He continued his research career at the University of California Los Angeles (where he learned electrophysiology), the Free University of Brussels, Belgium (where he learned how to make neural network models) and the California Institute of Technology (where he made the fundamental discovery that phosphorylation state changes ionic currents) before joining the Yale faculty in 1981. The Kaczmarek group studies biochemical changes in neurons that result in prolonged changes in the behavior of an animal or detect specific patterns of sensory inputs. He is well-known for discovering the genes for several ion channel proteins that are directly responsible for the excitability of nerve cells. His work was the first to demonstrate directly that rapid changes in phosphorylation state of ion channels occur in vivo in response to changes in the animal’s environment. Currently his lab is focused on the way mutations in these proteins may be responsible for several forms of intellectual disability and autism. He has been very fortunate to have many exceptionally talented pre- and postdoctoral trainees in his laboratory. Thirty-two of the students and postdocs from the Kaczmarek laboratory have gone on to hold tenure-track faculty positions at major institutions including Brown University, Yale University, UCSF, UCSD, Vanderbilt and many more.

Dr. Kaye is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, using a combination of circuit and computational approaches to understand adaptations to the danger in the environment and how those adaptations underlie PTSD. He graduated from the University of California M.D., Ph.D. program, where he used two-photon imaging and computational modeling to understand the organization of visual motion processing. Then, he joined the psychiatry residency at Yale, where he worked in Alex Kwan's lab on using calcium and neurotransmitter imaging to understand how arousal states change after stress, and also developed computational models of PTSD.The lab will focus on understanding how neuromodulatory circuits reprogram one another to create adaptive responses to traumatic experiences. Underlying this idea is the central problem of developing a mechanistic and functional understanding of stress and anxiety. The lab uses microendoscope and two-photon imaging of calcium and neurotransmitter sensors, large-scale electrophysiology (Neuropixels), computational analysis of behavior (DeepLabCut), and single cell transcriptomics to understand this problem.

I am a Professor of Psychiatry and of Neuroscience at Yale University School of Medicine. I graduated from National Taiwan University College of Medicine and California Institute of Technology and has been a faculty member at Yale since 2003. My earlier work employed non-human primate models to understand the neural bases of cognition. Current research in my laboratory continues to focus on systems neuroscience. By combining psychophysics, computational modeling and brain imaging we explore the circuit mechanisms of a multitude of cognitive constructs, including self control, affect regulation, and reward-related processes. The primary goals are to understand systems neural bases of these cognitive processes and how these neural processes contribute to the etiology of psychiatric and neurological illnesses, with a specific emphasis on addiction.

Ken Loh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Medicine in the Institute for Biomolecular Design and Discovery at Yale University’s West Campus. A native of Singapore, he received his B.S. in Chemistry from Harvey Mudd College in 2009 and earned his Ph.D in Chemistry with Alice Ting at MIT in 2016, developing chemical-enzymatic methodologies for tagging proteins in cells. Ken next received postdoctoral training with Jeffrey Friedman at Rockefeller University, studying the role of leptin in its regulation of sympathetic nerves in the fat organ, and joined the faculty at Yale in August of 2022. His lab is interested in studying brain-body interactions at a molecular length scale, using tools in chemical biology.

I love exploring the unknown and the thrill and sense of accomplishment that comes with making the unknown familiar. This passion has inspired me to make significant transitions, both conceptually and with methodology, at every stage of my career.  I purposefully choose research projects that serve to improve human health as well as stand to make fundamental discoveries of basic biology and physiology. Moreover, I thoroughly enjoy teaching, mentoring, and helping young scientists find the joy in science. As a graduate student with Kate Carroll at the University of Michigan and The Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, FL, I studied redox regulation of signal transduction cascades important to cancer. As a postdoctoral fellow with David Julius at the University of California, San Francisco, I determined the first structures of an important pain receptor, TRPA1 by cryo-EM. In the Paulsen Lab, we combine my diverse trainings to take a multidisciplinary approach to understand how TRPA1 is regulated and dysregulated by novel natural variants and through protein-protein interactions. This work is carried out with an eye towards discovering what a pain receptor "sees" in a cellular context, how those molecules can modulate its activity basally, and how those interactions may be modified to contribute to the development of chronic pain/inflammation.

Dr. Picciotto joined the Yale faculty in 1995, after completing a postdoctoral fellowship with Jean-Pierre Changeux in the Laboratory of Molecular Neuroscience at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. She earned a Ph.D. in Molecular Neurobiology at The Rockefeller University in New York City in 1992, where she worked in the Laboratory of Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience under Paul Greengard. She received a B.S. degree in biological sciences from Stanford University, Stanford, California, in 1985. Dr. Picciotto was Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Neuroscience until January 2023 and is a member of the ACNP Scientific Council. She is 2023-2024 President of the Society for Neuroscience. She served on the Scientific Council of the National Institute on Drug Abuse from 2010-2014, was Treasurer of the Society for Neuroscience from 2014-2015, and President of the Society for Research on Nicotine & Tobacco from 2018-2019. She has been a Handling Editor for the Journal of Neuroscience, the Journal of Nicotine and Tobacco Research, the Journal of Neurochemistry and Neuroscience Letters. In 2000 she was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering by President Clinton and in 2012 she was elected to the National Academy of Medicine and the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was Chair of the Neuroscience Section from 2018-2019. Dr. Picciotto has been awarded the Human Frontiers 10th Anniversary Award, the Jacob P. Waletzky Award for addiction research and the Bernice Grafstein Mentorship award from the Society for Neuroscience, the Marion Spencer Fay Award from Drexel University, the Langley Award from SRNT, the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award for Innovative Research and the Carnegie Prize in Mind and Brain Sciences. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2024. She is currently the president of the Society for Neuroscience.