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Pitt Promotes Dustin Pardini, PhD to Associate Professor of Psychiatry

Congratulations to Dustin Pardini, PhD on his appointment to the rank of Associate Professor of Psychiatry by the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

A graduate of the University of Alabama, Dr. Pardini earned his PhD in Child Clinical Psychology in 2003 and completed his clinical psychology internship at the University of Washington in Seattle.  He obtained postdoctoral training at the University of Pittsburgh as a fellow in the federally funded Psychiatric Epidemiology Training Program under the mentorship of Rolf Loeber, PhD, and was appointed Assistant Professor of Psychiatry in 2005.  Throughout his career at the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Pardini has been actively engaged in research and training activities. 

Dr. Pardini?s research focuses on developmental precursors and outcomes associated with antisocial behavior, violence, psychopathic features, and substance use/abuse across the lifespan.  He is particularly interested in the study of structural/functional neurobiological abnormalities associated with criminal behavior and psychopathy; and the development, prevention and treatment of conduct problems and callousness in youth.    His work in this area helped to support the inclusion of a new limited prosocial emotions specifier for conduct disorder in DSM-5, and earned him the 2013 Early Career Contribution Award from the Society of the Scientific Study of Psychopathy.  Dr. Pardini is currently the Principal Investigator for two federally funded projects, a projected funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse to examine the early developmental precursor and later adult life outcomes associated with differing developmental patterns of marijuana use from childhood to adulthood, and a grant from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention to continue dissemination and archiving of data from the Pittsburgh Youth Study, a long-range project studying inner-city boys intellectual, social and emotional development from childhood into adulthood.  Dr. Pardini has also actively collaborated on numerous other externally sponsored projects, and serves as the lead or senior author for 38 of 72 peer-reviewed published articles in journals including the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, the Journal of American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and Biological Psychiatry as well as numerous book chapters and abstracts.  He has presented his work at conferences and scientific meetings in the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe.

In addition to his extensive research activities, Dr. Pardini is engaged in a number of training and collaborative initiatives.  He is a member of the program faculty for the federally funded Clinical Research Training in Child Psychiatry training program, the Pitt Psychology Training Program, and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, a joint venture of the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University.  Dr. Pardini is also the former Director of the Minority Research Training Program in Violence for undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral minority scholars funded by the Pennsylvania Department of Health.   His service to the academic community also includes membership on the Centers for Disease Control's Panel on Protective and Promotive Factors for Youth Violence, serving as a reviewer for the U.S. Department of Justice and the American society for Criminology, and providing reviews for numerous scientific journals.

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Pardini on achieving this important milestone in his career.