Lynn Selemon, PhD

My undergraduate training was undertaken at the University of Pennsylvana where I earned a BA in biology. I continued my doctoral training in neuroscience in the Center for Brain Research at the University of Rochester. From there I came to the Department of Neurobiology at Yale in 1982 as a postdoctoral fellow under the mentorship of the late Dr. Patricia Goldman-Rakic. My research focus over the past 30 years has been on quantitative neuroanatomic studies elucidating the neuropathology of schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders. I performed a series of morphometric, postmortem studies of brains from schizophrenia subjects that uncovered deficits in the neuropil compartment of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, leading to the hypothesis that reduced connectivity of the prefrontal cortex is a major feature of the pathology of the disease. More recently, I have been involved in studying a nonhuman primate model of schizophrenia, the fetally irradiated monkey, to examine the role that disruption of prenatal brain development may play in the etiology of diseases like schizophrenia that are thought to have an developmental origin. I am currently studying changes in dendritic spine density in the frontal lobe of PTSD patients.