Rajita Sinha, PhD, Foundations Fund Professor of Psychiatry and Professor of Neuroscience and of Child Study, has received the 2020 James H. Tharp Award, a trust-funded award given by the Board of Directors of the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM).
The award was given in recognition of Sinha’s research discoveries on understanding and solving the problem of alcoholism. It comes with a $10,000 monetary contribution provided by the trust for her program to promote research on the addiction of alcoholism.
Sinha’s research focuses on the mechanism underlying chronic stress and adversity to negative health consequences. She has made discoveries in identifying childhood trauma, chronic stress, and addiction-related brain and peripheral changes in stress pathways that affect behavioral choices and decision making and loss of control to increase addiction and chronic disease risk.
She is the Founding Director of the Yale Stress Center, which focuses on understand the stress mechanisms that affect health behaviors, mood and emotion regulation, and chronic disease risk. She is Chief of the Yale Department of Psychiatry’s Psychology Section.
In 2020 Sinha received the Research Society on Alcoholism Distinguished Researcher Award for her outstanding scientific contributions to the alcohol field.