Collaborators

Dr. Cole's research focuses on discovering the cognitive and neural mechanisms that make human behavior uniquely flexible and intelligent. His research focuses on two broad themes. 1) Brain network mechanisms of flexible cognitive control: Flexible control – a capacity supporting adaptive, goal-directed behavior important in daily life – is affected in a variety of mental illnesses, markedly reducing quality of life. See Cole & Schneider (2007) for evidence that flexible control is implemented by a set of integrated brain regions sometimes referred to as the cognitive control network. See Cole, Pathak, et al. (2010) and Cole, Yarkoni, et al. (2012) for evidence that this network implements control via its high connectivity throughout the brain, as indexed by global brain connectivity (GBC). See Cole, Anticevic, et al. (2011) for a recent demonstration of how a breakdown in the GBC of a core node of this network may contribute to the profound cognitive control deficits associated with schizophrenia. 2) Rapid instructed task learning (RITL; "rittle") : A key aspect of flexible control is our ability to rapidly reconfigure our minds to perform a nearly infinite variety of possible tasks. For instance, you utilized RITL the first time you used a cell phone – transferring what you knew about 'land line' phones while expanding what was possible with such a device. Comprehensive understanding of this ability would have important implications for research in education, aging, and a variety of mental illnesses. See Cole, Bagic, et al. (2010) for a novel cognitive paradigm for investigating RITL, as well as evidence that RITL involves a specific shift in dynamics within prefrontal cortex. See Cole, Etzel, et al. (2011) for evidence that RITL is possible due to rapid transfer of practiced task rule representations within prefrontal cortex to novel contexts. See Cole, Laurent, & Stocco (2013) for a review of RITL findings and an integrative theory of how prefrontal cortex may implement RITL abilities and cognitive flexibility generally.

Dr. David Glahn joined Yale’s Department of Psychiatry and the Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center in 2008. He received his doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000 and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of California at Los Angeles. From 2002 to 2008, Glahn was faculty at the University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio, where he created a psychiatric genetics and imaging research program. The primary aim of Glahn’s laboratory is to discover genes that predispose affective and psychotic disorders like major depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. To achieve this aim, he develops and applies neuroanatomic, functional neuroimaging, and neurocognitive endophenotypes in large-scale family-based studies. Glahn co-direct the Neurocognition, Neurocomputation and Neurogenetics (n3) Division of the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University Medical School, and the Affective Disorders and Psychosis (ADAPTING) laboratory at the Olin Neuropsychiatric Research Center. In this capacity, he supervises an 11-strong research team comprised of junior faculty, postdoctoral fellows and research assistants. Glahn collaborates with investigators locally at Yale/Olin, nationally and internationally in connection to neuroimaging, neurocognition and genomic research.

Dr. Krystal is a leading expert in the areas of alcoholism, post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia, and depression. His work links psychopharmacology, neuroimaging, molecular genetics, and computational neuroscience to study the neurobiology and treatment of these disorders. He is best known for leading the discovery of the rapid antidepressant effects of ketamine in depressed patients.He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine. He also serves in a variety of advisory and review capacities for NIAAA, NIMH, Wellcome Trust, Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, the Broad Institute, the Karolinska Institutet, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.Dr. Krystal previously served on the National Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism Advisory Council (NIAAA), the Department of Defense Psychological Health Advisory Committee, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Advisory Council, and the NIMH Board of Scientific Counselors (chair, 2005-2007). He has led the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (president, 2012), and International College of Neuropsychophamacology (president, 2016-2018). Currently, he is co-chair of the Forum on Neuroscience and Nervous System Disorders (NeuroForum) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and he edits the journal, Biological Psychiatry (impact factor: 13.382).

YCCI K ScholarProject: 09/30/06 - 06/30/09Sleep and cognition in cocaine dependece

John D. Murray is the Gregg L. Engles Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College. Dr. Murray completed a PhD in Physics from Yale University, followed by postdoctoral research at New York University in the Center for Neural Science. He was primary faculty in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine from 2015 to 2023, with secondary appointments in Physics and Neuroscience. His research is in the areas of computational neuroscience and computational psychiatry.

Dr. Pearlson's medical school training was in the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in England. Following this he completed a graduate degree in philosophy at Columbia University in New York and was successively a resident, postdoctoral fellow and faculty member at Johns Hopkins University Department of Psychiatry under Dr. Paul McHugh, where he was ultimately Professor of Psychiatry and founding director of the division of Psychiatry Neuroimaging.Dr. Pearlson is currently founding director of the Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center, a 50-person organization consisting of 5 component labs. The Center specializes in the translational neuroscience of major mental illness, including dementias, mood disorders, substance abuse (cannabis, alcohol, cocaine), schizophrenia and psychotic bipolar disorder, ADHD, autism spectrum and other conditions spanning childhood to old age.The center includes two 3-Tesla research-dedicated MRI scanners and scans ~1200 individuals annually, all of whom are genotyped. It has a fully equipped psychophysiology lab, rTMS suite and a bio-bank for specimen storage. The Center also specializes in the importation of virtual reality (VR) paradigms into the functional MRI environment to yield ecologically valid "virtual environments" to study complex behaviors in the scanner such as automobile driving.Dr. Pearlson's research uses neuroimaging as a tool to address a broader array of questions regarding the neurobiology of major mental disorders, primarily psychosis and substance abuse. Important "firsts" include showing that structural and functional brain changes associated with schizophrenia can also occur in psychotic bipolar disorder, the relationship of structural and functional abnormalities in the superior temporal gyrus with hallucinations in schizophrenia, using VR to explore complex behaviors in the MRI scanner (or example simulated driving) to assess disruptive effects of abused substances (cannabis, alcohol) and the first demonstration of human in-vivo cocaine-mediated dopamine release using PET ligands. As part of the B-SNIP consortium, his lab contributed towards a reconceptualization of psychotic illness based on biological, rather than clinical syndromic criteria.Dr. Pearlson is an former NIMH MERIT awardee and is PI on multiple R01 grants from NIAAA, NIDA and NIMH. He has been awarded a NARSAD Distinguished Investigator award and a Michael visiting professorship from the Weizmann Institute. He has published >750 peer-reviewed research articles, with an H-index of 108. He is also co-founder of the annual BrainDance competition for high school and college students across New England. These competitive awards encourage students to gain knowledge about psychiatric diseases and to develop a more tolerant and realistic perspective towards people with severe psychiatric problems. Dr. Pearlson was awarded the 2019 American Psychiatric Association Mentorship Award, the 2015 Stanley Dean Award for Schizophrenia Research from the American College of Psychiatrists and in 2015 was inducted into the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars (distinguished alumni).Current important intra-departmental collaborations are with Drs. Krystal (CTNA), Gelernter and Potenza.

Chris Pittenger earned his MD and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University, where his graduate work was done with Nobel Prize recipient Eric Kandel. He returned to Yale University, his undergraduate alma mater, for residency and research training in psychiatry in 2003. He joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor in 2007 and is now Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor of Psychiatry, Professor of Psychology and in the Child Study Center, and Deputy Chair for Translational Research in the Department of Psychiatry .Chris has always been fascinated by the question of how the brain, a complex but ultimately a physical structure, creates thought, feeling, consciousness, and other aspects of the mind.  As a psychiatrist he is additionally focused on how these processes go wrong - how brain dysregulation leads to dysregulated cognition, emotion, and behavior and to mental suffering, and how advancing our understanding of these relationships can guide us to new strategies to alleviate that suffering.  Much of his work has focused on obsessive-compulsive disorder and Tourette syndrome and on the cortico-basal ganglia circuitry that is implicated in their pathophysiology.  More recently he has co-founded the Yale Program for Psychedelic Science, focused on understanding how molecules like psilocybin and LSD can teach us about brain and behavior and may lead to new treatments for a range of neuropsychiatric pathology.  He is also one of the founding Directors of the Yale Center for Brain and Mind Health, which seeks to bridge disciplines and levels of analysis to bring new therapeutics to individuals suffering from disorders of the mind and brain.Dr. Pittenger's research and clinical work have been acknowledged by a number of prestigious awards, including grant funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Neurological Disease and Stroke, NARSAD, the Tourette Syndrome of America, the Doris Duke Charitable Trust, and other organizations.  He has won a number of awards, including from the National Institute of Mental Health, the Society for Neuroscience, the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American College of Psychiatrists. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the International OCD Foundation and Chair of both their Grant Review Committee and their Annual Research Symposium Planning Committee.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Neurological Association.

Dr. Grega Repovs graduated in Psychology at Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana in 1996. He was offered a position the same year as instructor in General psychology. In 1999 successfully completed masters thesis Semantic memory and visual attention in schizophrenia at Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. In 2002 Successfully defended Ph.D. dissertation titled: "Computational model of attentional deficits in schizophrenia". Dr. Repovs subsequently joined the Cognitive Control and Psychopathology Lab at Department of Psychology, Washington University in Saint Louis, USA as postdoctoral research fellow where he trained in functional connectivity approaches to study large scale neural systems via non-invasive neuroimaging. His main research interest are centered on cognitive neuroscience broadly, where he is striving to combine classical behavioral research with findings provided by computational science, neuroscience with modern methods of brain imaging, and cognitive neuropsychology and neuropsychiatry. His specific interests are in study of attention and cognitive control, working memory, semantic memory. His other research topics include spatial cognition and cognitive maps, crisis management and leadership, psychological consequences of coping with stress, cognitive theories of self and social reality.

Dr. Stamatios Sotiropoulos is an Associate Professor of Computational Neuroimaging in the Sir Peter Mansfield Imaging Centre, School of Medicine, University of Nottingham. He also holds an honorary Research Fellow position with the Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain, University of Oxford. He has a background in Computer Engineering, but he works for the last 15 years at the interface of computational modelling, MRI physics and neuroscience. His research expertise is in biophysical modelling of brain connections at different scales using multi-dimensional diffusion MRI (dMRI), for resolving tissue microstructural patterns and long-range connectivity. Towards this aim, he has developed a number of algorithmic frameworks, including parametric/non-parametric approaches for estimating neuronal fibre patterns, data integration models and tractography methods. Due to the indirect nature of dMRI, quantities of interest can only be inferred from the data and the developed frameworks uniquely allow estimation of tissue properties non-invasively and in-vivo. His software developments are publicly released through the FSL neuroimaging suite (www.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/fsl), one of the most widely-used software packages for brain image analysis worldwide. Over the last years, Dr Sotiropoulos has been heavily involved with the design and implementation of new technologies that push the boundaries of in-vivo MRI acquisitions. Through his contributions to the cornerstone Human Connectome Project (HCP), he has been involved in large-scale efforts and developments that allow in-vivo 3T and 7T MRI acquisitions of unprecedented quality. He is currently in the Editorial Board of NeuroImage, the top neuroimaging methods journal, and contributing to a number of large-scale connectome projects (the ERC-funded developing HCP, the UK Biobank, the NIH-funded Lifespan HCP).

Dr. Srihari's scholarly focus is on improving the outcomes of early course schizophrenia spectrum disorders. His research interests span the translational continuum from studies of etiology and pathophysiology to interventions on clinical samples, to service level innovations. As Director of the STEP Program, he leads activities that connect this research to the missions of delivering a model service (the STEP Clinic), disseminating clinical best practices (via Learning Health Networks), education and workforce development and influencing policies that support the public health mission of early Intervention for schizophrenia spectrum disorders.  In his curricular work, he has led the development and implementation of an Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) based approach to enabling psychiatrists in training to ask, access, appraise and apply the best available scientific evidence to their practice and to audit the health of the populations they are responsible for.Dr. Srihari also consults with academic and non-academic healthcare systems that seek to initiate or refine early intervention services for recent onset or 'first-episode' psychosis.