Psychatric Illnesses and Addiction

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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. Constable received his PhD in Medical Physics from the University of Toronto. He came to Yale as a postdoctoral fellow and has been here since. In addition to being the director of MRI in the Yale Magnetic Resonance Research Center, he runs two parallel labs. One lab is a neuroscience lab focused on mapping the functional organization of the brain through functional MRI measurements and understanding the relationship between this functional organization and behavior. Such developments are leading to new approaches to functionally phenotype individuals with applications in subtyping in brain disorders and disease. Dr. Constable's other lab is focused on the development of novel MRI devices with projects around low field MRI's that can be placed in doctor's offices, with the potential to make MRI much more accessible than it is in it's current form.

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.

Irina Esterlis is a clinical neuropsychologist and neuroreceptor imager with extensive training in the application of SPECT and PET to the study of mental illness and comorbid disorders. Dr. Esterlis has developed two novel paradigms to interrogate both the acetylcholine and glutamatergic systems in vivo in human, and these are being currently applied to the study of mood and addiction disorders. She has received awards from Society of Nuclear Medicine, American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, and American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Esterlis' current work includes the study of the metabotropic glutamatergic receptor involvement in bipolar depression and suicide, as well as the effects of depression on synaptic aging. Dr. Esterlis is also initiating new work in the study of neurotransmitter alterations in adolescent depression and suicidality.

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.

Dr. Goldfarb is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology and member of the Wu Tsai Institute. She completed her PhD in Psychology: Cognition & Perception with Dr. Elizabeth Phelps at New York University and a postdoctoral fellowship in the Departments of Diagnostic Radiology and Psychiatry with Dr. Rajita Sinha at Yale. Her research investigates different forms of learning and memory, how stress changes which parts of our experiences we remember, and the impact of memory on later behavior.

After completing an undergraduate degree in Computing Science at the University of Alberta, Dr. Hampson did her graduate work in Boston University's Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems, a department focused on computational neural network models of brain systems. She came to Yale as a postdoc to pursue her interests in human functional neuroimaging. During her postdoc, Dr. Hampson conducted some of the earliest studies of resting-state functional connectivity, validating the technique and relating resting-state functional connectivity measures to behavioral variables. Later, she turned her focus to using real-time fMRI neurofeedback for training people to control their brain activity patterns. She is interested in novel functional neuroimaging techniques and psychiatric applications of these techniques.

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.

Dr. Laura Huckins is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry. She received her masters in BioEngineering from Imperial College London in 2011, and her PhD in Molecular Biology and Psychiatric Genetics from the University of Cambridge in 2015. Her research focuses primarily on studying psychiatric disorders, with an emphasis on eating disorders and PTSD, as well as development and application of multi-omic methods to interpret the functional consequences of GWAS variants. Her lab focuses particularly on Eating Disorders and PTSD; to this end, she is co-chair of the PGC Eating Disorders working group.Dr. Huckins' work is funded by the Klarman Family Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Karim Ibrahim is an Assistant Professor at the Yale Child Study Center. His translational neuroscience research focuses on brain networks associated with emotion regulation impairments in childhood-onset psychiatric disorders. Dr. Karim Ibrahim’s research is interdisciplinary and integrates multimodal imaging methods including functional and structural MRI, machine learning, and network neuroscience/connectomics approaches to identify biomarkers relevant to child psychopathology. His recent interests lie in using and developing tools predictive modeling/machine learning approaches that leverage large-scale neuroimaging datasets, including data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, for identifying robust brain-based biomarkers. Among other things in this area, his research also investigates dynamics of the human functional connectome and large-scale networks, how brain connectivity is altered in mental health disorders (such as a disruptive behavior disorders, anxiety disorders, and autism spectrum disorder) and the neural response to treatment in youths. As a licensed clinical child psychologist, he also has extensive experience in developmental psychopathology, including assessments and cognitive-behavioral interventions for autism spectrum disorder, mood, anxiety, and disruptive behavior. Karim completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Yale Child Study Center T32 research program in Translational Developmental Neuroscience and through an award from the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation multidisciplinary research training program.