Rajita Sinha, PhD

Rajita Sinha, Ph.D. is the Foundations Fund Endowed Professor in Psychiatry, and Professor in Neuroscience and in Child Study at the Yale University School of Medicine. She is a licensed Clinical Psychologist and Clinical Neuroscientist, Deputy Chair of Psychiatry for Psychology and Chief of the Psychology Section in Psychiatry. She is the founding director of the Yale Interdisciplinary Stress Center that focuses on understanding the neurobiology and psychology of stress, trauma and resilient versus vulnerable biobehavioral coping mechanisms that promote neuropsychiatric diseases such as alcohol use disorders, substance use disorders, chronic pain, PTSD and other chronic diseases. She has developed novel stress, pain and craving provocation paradigms to understand mechanisms that drive these states and related pathologies and their impact on clinical addiction outcomes in alcohol use disorder, substance use disorders and related conditions. Her lab also develops and tests novel pharmacologic and integrative behavioral approaches to address chronic stress and addiction relapse risk to improve addiction treatment outcomes. These objectives are being accomplished through a series of NIH funded research projects and she has published widely on these topics. She is the 2020 recipient of the Research Society on Alcoholism's Distinguished Researcher Award, and the 2020 recipient of the James Tharpe Award for outstanding contributions to Addiction Research. She has served on many NIH special emphasis panels, review committees and workshops, presented at numerous national and international conferences, and her work is widely cited.