Four assistant professors of psychiatry are among the recent awardees named 2020 Yale Center for Clinical Investigation (YCCI) Junior Faculty Scholars.
Sarah Fineberg, MD, PhD; Angela Haeny, PhD; Lorig Kachadourian, PhD; and Janet Lydecker, PhD will spend the next two years as Junior Faculty Scholars.
Fineberg came to Yale in 2010 to pursue clinical and research training in psychiatry. Her current research engages both stories and brain-based mechanisms of mental illness, asking questions about how patient social experiences relate to neural circuits and learning mechanisms.
Haeny’s research addresses racial disparities in substance use disorder treatment. She has developed and leads groups focused on healing from race-related stress and trauma. Haeny has taught courses on ethnic and cultural diversity in psychology, led workshops on engaging in productive difficult dialogues, and led seminars on assessing race-related stress and trauma.
Kachadourian’s primary research interests concern anger and aggression and associated risk factors including trauma exposure, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and substance use. She also is interested in developing and testing alternative treatments for anger and aggression, including mindfulness-based interventions.
Lydecker conducts research on binge-eating disorder and eating-disorder psychopathology, as well as obesity and weight stigma. Her current projects broadly focus on parent-child communication and influences on eating and weight.
The YCCI Junior Faculty Scholars Program began in 2006 as the educational arm of the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation. The program aims to attract a diverse group of junior faculty across multiple disciplines in the Schools of Medicine, Nursing, Public Health and Biomedical Engineering who are interested in pursuing careers in translational research, and train them in the use of state-of-the-art research tools, provide them the skills to work in complex and diverse multidisciplinary research teams, and to support their professional development.
Scholars regularly present their work at bimonthly Research in Progress meetings with students from the Investigative Medicine Program and participate in the YCCI Clinical Scholars' Research Day. The program's components are designed to create an environment that encourages cross-fertilization and multidisciplinary approaches and maximizes the likelihood of successful careers in clinical and translational research.