Rajita Sinha, PhD

Rajita Sinha, PhD, is Foundations Fund Professor of Psychiatry and Professor in the Child Study Center and of Neuroscience; Director, Yale Interdisciplinary Stress Center; Deputy Chair of Psychiatry for Psychology and Chief, Psychology Section in Psychiatry. Her research is focused on understanding the biobehavioral processes by which stress, trauma and adversity are associated with both risk for addiction and relapse and treatment failure for addictive disorders and other chronic mental and physical illness risk. Her research also elucidates stress resilience mechanisms and processes by which those mechanisms are affected by stress and trauma to increase within and inter-generational vulnerability to addiction and other mental and physical illnesses. Her program also develops and tests novel addiction prevention and treatment strategies that target stress pathophysiology in addictive disorders and stress regulation in individuals at-risk for addiction problems. She utilizes a number of different approaches to address these objectives, including human experimental studies, neuroimaging, neurocognitive approaches, pharmacological approaches, sociobehavioral and clinical treatment outcome studies and prevention approaches. These objectives are accomplished through various NIH funded research projects available for fellow involvement.