Neuropharmacology

Nii Addy is the Albert E. Kent Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Associate Professor of Cellular and Molecular Physiology and the inaugural Director of Scientist Diversity and Inclusion at Yale School of Medicine. He is also Director of the Faculty Mentoring Program, Minority Organization for Recruitment and Expansion (MORE) and co-chair of the Career Development Subcommittee of the Anti-Racism Task Force in the Yale Department of Psychiatry. He contributes to graduate student and postdoctoral training and to diversity, equity, and inclusion 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, Nicotine & Tobacco Research, and Neuropharmacology, and is 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, culture and social justice. 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 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 co-founded Renaissance Entertainment and Mefreely, companies that combine music, science, and community building to drive social change.

Dr. Anticevic trained in Clinical Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at Washington University in St. Louis where he trained with Drs. Deanna Barch and David Van Essen. Following graduate training, Dr. Anticevic completed his internship in Clinical Neuropsychology at Yale University. After internship, he joined the Yale University Department of Psychiatry as research faculty while concurrently serving as the Administrative Director for the Center for the Translational Neuroscience of Alcoholism. Subsequently, he was appointed as an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the Yale University School of Medicine, where he directs a clinical neuroimaging laboratory focused on severe mental illness. Dr. Anticevic is a recipient of the NARSAD Young Investigator Award, the International Congress of Schizophrenia Research Young Investigator Award, the NIH Director's Early Independence Award, the NARSAD Independent Investigator Award and the Klerman Prize for Exceptional Clinical Research. He currently serves as the Director of the Division of Neurocognition, Neurocomputation, and Neurogenetics (N3) at Yale School of Medicine.His group's research focus is centered on computational and cognitive neuroscience of mental illness. Specifically, Dr. Anticevic's group is interested in characterizing neural mechanisms involved in higher order cognitive operations, such as working memory, as well as their interaction with neural systems involved in affective processes, with the aim of understanding how these computations may go awry in the context of severe mental illness . Methodologically, his group uses the combination of task-based, resting-state, pharmacological multi-modal neuroimaging, as well as computational modeling approaches to map neural alterations that lead to poor mental health outcomes. The overarching goal of the group is to develop neurobiologically principled and computationally grounded mapping between neural and behavioral levels of analyses in people to inform personalized and rational treatment design for mental health symptoms.

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 also a member of the Wu Tsai Institute and the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience at Yale. He is the co-Director of Undergraduate Studies of 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 positron emission tomography (PET) to gain insights into the brains of people after they’ve stopped using alcohol and drugs. Trained as a clinical psychologist who worked with individuals managing alcohol and drug addiction, Dr. Cosgrove transitioned to conducting research in order to find more effective ways of helping patients recover from addiction and avoid relapse. Her laboratory develops and uses creative PET imaging paradigms to track changes in critical neurochemicals during the recovery from addiction.

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.

Ansel obtained his Ph.D. in Medical Physics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2014. His research program features core areas of translational characterization of novel PET radiotracers, developing new imaging paradigms to improve quantification of brain neurobiology, and human neuroimaging research studying mechanisms underlying diverse psychiatric conditions. Research efforts are complemented by didactic activities lecturing at Yale and individual mentoring of trainees. Current projects include characterizing novel PET radiotracers of immune-related targets in the brain; developing novel imaging paradigms to study acute alcohol effects on neuroimmune and glutamate systems; assessment of dopamine release from smoked cannabis; method development for analyzing multimodal imaging data from fMRI-PET or PET-PET datasets; and implementing Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to identify different sources of PET radiotracer uptake.

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.