Arie Kaffman, MD, PhD

Dr. Kaffman is a physician scientist who is working as a psychiatrist at the Newington VA treating large number of veterans mainly with PTSD. He also has a basic neuroscience lab at Yale studying the effects of early life stress on neurodevelopment and complex behavior in the mouse. His lab is focusing on the role that microglia, which are specialized brain immune cells, play in altering connectivity and behavior in mice exposed to different doses of postnatal stress. The goal of this translational work is to clarify how early adversity alters neurodevelopment of circuits that regulate psychiatrically relevant behaviors and to use this information for the development of novel diagnostic and treatment modalities. Dr. Kaffman did his M.D, Ph.D. training at UCSF. He did his Ph.D. with Dr. Erin O’Shea’s studying how yeast cells (i.e. Saccharomyces cerevisiae) are able to rapidly phosphorylate and eject the transcriptional regulator Pho4 from the nucleus under environmental conditions in which it was no longer necessary. He then completed a residency in psychiatry and received a career award providing him with additional training in neurodevelopment, genomic/proteomic work, and neuroimmunology. Dr. Kaffman has been the PI on several NIH funded grants that combine molecular/cellular, genomic, pharmacological, and behavioral traditional neuroscience approaches with human imaging techniques such resting state fMRI and high resolution dMRI.