Sarah Lichenstein

Dr. Lichenstein is a licensed clinical psychologist, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, and the Assistant Director of the Yale Imaging and Psychopharmacology Lab at Yale School of Medicine. Her work uses multimodal neuroimaging methods to study the role of developing neural network connectivity in the etiology and course of mood and substance use disorders (SUD) during adolescence and emerging adulthood. Her recent and ongoing projects include a NIDA-funded K08 award combining multiple, large-scale, neuroimaging datasets with novel densely-sampled fMRI data to identify a neuromarker of problem cannabis use and characterize its development prior to cannabis use onset, and in the context of current cannabis use during adolescence. The neuromarker identified, termed 'the problem cannabis risk network', has now been found to generalize to predict cannabis use outcomes in five independent non-clinical and clinical datasets. Other recent work includes a Women’s Health Research at Yale pilot project examining the neural and subjective effects of cannabidiol in healthy female volunteers and several projects leveraging the large-scale Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study dataset to elucidate neurodevelopmental risk factors for SUD and effects of early adversity on the brain.