Kunmi Sobowale, MD, a second-year resident in the Yale Department of Psychiatry, has been selected to participate in the American Psychiatric Association’s Research Colloquium for Junior Investigators.
Sobowale will be part of the Clinical Psychobiology track at the colloquium, which will take place May 21 at the 170th APA Annual Meeting in San Diego.
Participants receive guidance, mentoring, and encouragement from senior researchers. They also have the opportunity to present a research project for discussion by faculty and peers.
Sobowale will discuss his work on academic stress as a model to assess whether reward-system deficits moderate the role of stress in the pathogenesis of depression. He is working with Ifat Levy and Helen Pushkarskaya in the Decision Neuroscience Lab to learn behavioral tasks such as decision-making to assess reward dysfunction.
By delineating reward deficits, the researchers hope to better understand the pathophysiology of depression and develop psychosocial interventions for prevention and early detection of depression.
Participation in the colloquium includes a $1,200 stipend which may be used to pay for travel and lodging expenses.