Eyiyemisi Damisah, MD Receives Kavli Institute Innovative Research Award

Eyiyemisi Damisah, assistant professor of neurosurgery and section chief of epilepsy at Yale School of Medicine has recently been honored by a large grant from the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience for a project co-led with Alfred Kaye, MD, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry. The project is titled: Exploring the continuum of threat-imminence oscillations using human iEEG.

It is part of a collaborative effort between Yale departments of neurosurgery, neurology, and psychiatry to determine the neural correlates of PTSD and eventually develop a closed loop brain stimulation device to treat the disease. There are currently no surgical treatments available for PTSD, a disease that affects 8 million adults in the United States in any given year.

“The Yale Kavli grants are designed to bring researchers together across scientific boundaries to tackle interesting new problems in neuroscience,” says Marina Picciotto, PhD, deputy director of the Kavli Institute. “The project proposed by Drs. Damisah and Kaye is exciting because it will ask a fundamental question about how the brain encodes threat and will approach the question with unique tools that allow a basic neuroscience question to be asked in human subjects.”

“This project is a beautiful example of translational science,” adds Pietro Di Camilli, MD, director of the Kavli Institute. “We are delighted to see Kavli funds help support a project at the interface between basic science and questions of great clinical relevance.”