Vaughn R. Steele, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry, has been chosen to receive a Yale Center for Clinical Investigation (YCCI) Scholar Award.
The award provides salary and/or research funding to junior faculty members who are strongly committed to research careers focused on human health. It is intended to prepare recipients for successful independent research careers.
The award will be for 24 months, and Steele will receive additional mentoring and training. He will be required to attend and submit abstracts to one or two regional or national research meetings and to attend local YCCI events.
The title of Steele’s project is, “Testing malleability of executive control processes measured with event-related potentials in a sample prescribed methadone for opioid use disorder.” His mentoring and collaboration team consists of Dr. Godfrey Pearlson, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience and director of the Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center (ONRC); Dr. Michael Stevens, director of the Clinical Neuroscience & Development Lab at ONRC, adjunct professor of psychiatry; and Zafiris “Jeff” Daskalakis, professor and chair of psychiatry at University of California, San Diego.
Steele joined Yale’s Department of Psychiatry in the Division of Addiction Sciences in January 2020. His research centers on developing treatments for people who suffer from substance abuse disorders (SUDs). His lab targets dysregulated circuits in SUD with transcranial magnetic stimulation to elicit neuroplastic change. The goal in the research is to identify malleable circuits that, with continued treatment, could lead to positive long-term outcomes treating SUDs.