Marina Picciotto, PhD, Charles B.G. Murphy Professor of Psychiatry and professor in the Child Study Center, of neurobiology, and of pharmacology, joined the Yale faculty in 1995. Her research focuses on the role of single molecules in complex behaviors related to addiction, depression, learning, and appetite.
Picciotto was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 2012. She serves on advisory councils of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Society for Neuroscience, and is an associate director of the Yale School of Medicine MD-PhD Program.
In her role as deputy chair for basic research in psychiatry, Picciotto will oversee an expanded Translational Neuroscience Initiative within the department's Division of Molecular Psychiatry.
What motivates you to conduct your research?
I am convinced that molecular- and systems-level studies in model organisms such as mice with genetic alteration of specific proteins will lead us to greater understanding of fundamental mechanisms of neuronal function, the pathways that go wrong in psychiatric illness, and new ways to treat patients with disorders such as depression and addiction. The ability of basic scientists, clinical researchers and clinicians who treat patients to use a common language to discuss the science underlying psychiatric illness is essential to translating basic neuroscience into new treatments, and this is something that is done especially well here in the psychiatry department at Yale.
How has your research evolved over the span of your career?
I was trained in molecular biology and biochemistry and spent my graduate years studying isolated proteins in the test tube. My research first opened up when I learned how to make changes in individual genes in mice as a postdoctoral fellow, allowing me to determine how the molecular pathways I studied had effects on complex behaviors. My research opened up even further when I joined the psychiatry department at Yale in 1995. Here, I learned how my work could influence the work of my colleagues with clinical training, and I began to collaborate to perform studies that translated my findings in mice to kids who have been exposed to tobacco in utero or in adolescence, smokers who want to quit, and individuals with depression or bipolar disorder. My collaborations with fellow faculty members who do imaging studies in patients, human laboratory studies or clinical trials have changed the questions we ask in my laboratory.
What makes Yale such a great place to do research?
The breadth and depth of expertise in neuroscience at Yale is impressive, and it has allowed my laboratory to collaborate with many other researchers across the university. What is most special about the psychiatry department, however, is that it has a long history of respect between clinical and basic neuroscience researchers that is rare in other universities. This respect is at the heart of the ability of the psychiatry department to translate research into new therapies.
What will be the focus of the Translational Neuroscience Initiative? And how will it further our understanding of addiction and psychiatric disorders?
The focus of the Translational Neuroscience Initiative will be to identify and hire exceptional basic neuroscientists who are interested in using their expertise to approach basic neuroscience questions relevant to psychiatric illness. The explosion of new tools to study neurons and the brain is allowing the field to ask questions about the neurobiological basis of complex behaviors and psychiatric disorders that were unapproachable even 5 or 10 years ago. This is a very exciting time to be in the field of neuroscience and psychiatry.
You have also led efforts within the department to provide increased mentorship for junior faculty. What one piece of advice would you give to individuals pursuing a long-term career in academic research?
Stay excited about what you do and hang in there! If you are asking important and difficult questions, your experiments will sometimes (often…) fail. If you don’t fail, the questions you are asking are likely not changing the field and are probably not pushing the boundaries of how we think. Have a diversified portfolio of research where you can use your expertise to answer questions that may not have been approachable previously.