News

Heather Joseph, DO has been selected for a fellowship award in Child and Adolescent ADHD by the Klingenstein Third Generation Foundation.  

The Foundation awards up to five fellowships per year. The awards are given to outstanding postdoctoral researchers in the United States who have demonstrated independent research ability potential and who are planning a career in research related to child and adolescent psychiatry or developmental psychopathology.  The goal of the fellowship is to fund research that provides a direct and tangible benefit to children and their families, and to help postdoctoral researchers take the next step on their career path to becoming an independent scientist.

The two-year fellowship award will support Dr. Joseph's project that examines visual reaction time variability as a measure of inattention in infants at high risk for ADHD. Using a cross-sectional design, she will assess visual reaction time of infants 8-10 months of age at high or low risk of developing ADHD by virtue of a parent with or without ADHD, and test the hypothesis that infants with parental ADHD have impaired attention. Outcomes from this study could provide novel information regarding the ability to detect early markers of inattention in infancy. 

Dr. Joseph earned her medical degree from Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine. As a psychiatry resident at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic of UPMC (WPIC), she was actively involved in the Psychiatry Research Pathway program and studied ADHD in youth under the mentorship of Dr. Brooke Molina at the Youth and Family Research Program.  Dr. Joseph is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Psychiatry's federally funded T32 research training program, Innovative Methods in Pathogenesis and Child Treatment (IMPACT). Her current research examines the course of prognosis of ADHD with a focus on associated parental factors.