The Department of Psychiatry Welcomes New Faculty Members Shinnyi Chou, MD, PhD, and Chaeryon Kang, PhD
Pitt Psychiatry extends a warm welcome to two new faculty members:
Shinnyi (Cindy) Chou, MD, PhD (Assistant Professor of Psychiatry)
Dr. Chou earned her MD and a PhD in behavioral neuroscience from the University of Nebraska Medical Center. She completed her residency training in psychiatry and a child and adolescent psychiatry clinical fellowship at UPMC Western Psychiatric Hospital (WPH). Dr. Chou then conducted postdoctoral research training as part of the Department’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)-funded Training in Transformative Discovery in Psychiatry T32 training program. Her research focuses on using human postmortem brain tissue and animal models to examine the role of terminal type-specific cannabinoid CB1 receptor alterations in behavioral aberrations relevant to schizophrenia and cannabis use. Dr. Chou additionally provides clinical care as an attending physician in WPH adult integrated behavioral health in primary care clinics.
Chaeryon Kang, PhD (Associate Professor of Psychiatry)
Dr. Kang earned her PhD in biostatistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and completed postdoctoral research in the Vaccine and Infectious Diseases Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. Dr. Kang previously held an academic appointment in the University of Pittsburgh Department of Biostatistics. Her research focuses on contributing to the delivery of advanced and personalized care and improving understanding of human behavior and health at the individual level. Dr. Kang has developed and applied statistical theories and methods and machine learning techniques for precision medicine, latent subgroup identification, and classification problems where subgroups have different associations, heterogeneous treatment effects, or are characterized using different features. She provides statistical tools for analyzing diverse and complex clinical and biomedical data to advance health through transdisciplinary collaborations in cognitive psychology, mental health, women’s health, physical activities, cancer, and HIV vaccine studies.
Please join us in welcoming Dr. Chou and Dr. Kang!