Yasmin Zakiniaeiz, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry, has been selected to receive a 2024 Society of Biological Psychiatry (SOBP) Travel Fellowship Award for the 2024 annual SOBP meeting.
The annual meeting will be held May 9-11, 2024, in Austin, Texas. Zakiniaeiz will receive a stipend to defray meeting expenses.
Selection criteria for the award includes past excellence in scholarly work, potential for scholarly growth in biological psychiatry and clinical neuroscience, and overall excellence.
As a SOBP Travel Award recipient, Zakiniaeiz will be matched with a mentor and will participate in the society’s Early Career Investigator Program throughout the 2024 meeting.
She will present on work examining sex differences in the neuroimmune system in individuals with alcohol use disorder. Her research reveals evidence for lower levels of a microglia marker in people with alcohol use disorder relative to controls, and this impairment is more pronounced in women.
Zakiniaeiz’s work broadly focuses on investigating the neural and molecular circuitry underlying several types of addictions and at-risk populations, such as alcohol use disorder, tobacco smoking, prenatally cocaine-exposed adolescents, and gambling disorder, using two neuroimaging techniques – functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET).
Her work also emphasizes the importance of sex as a biological variable in the study of addiction.