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Department Welcomes Dean Salisbury, PhD to Faculty

 

The Department of Psychiatry welcomes Dean Salisbury, PhD to the faculty.  Dr. Salisbury, Visiting Associate Professor of Psychiatry, is the Director of the Clinical Neurophysiology Research Laboratory.  He earned his doctorate degree in Biological Psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and completed a clinical research training fellowship focusing in Neuropsychiatry at the Harvard Medical School.  Dr Salisbury spent the last 20 years at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School studying the neurophysiology of psychosis. 

Dr. Salisbury's research interests focus on schizophrenia pathophysiology and human electrophysiology.  He utilizes electrophysiology and multimodal brain imaging to examine thought disturbance (cognitive-level) and basic auditory processing abnormalities (sensory-level) in psychosis, and specializes in event-related potential recordings in humans.  Dr. Salisbury has also collaborated extensively with colleagues using magnetic resonance imaging and functional magnetic resonance imaging methods on a number of research projects. 

The goal of Dr. Salisbury's work is to further understand the neurophysiology of psychosis. Brain activity measures span simple sensory and perceptual processes to complex higher-order cognition. Dysfunction in local circuit activity, reflected in sensory processing deficits, and in long-range distributed cortical processing, reflected in deficits in the interplay between semantic memory neural storage networks and working memory systems that allow adaptive and flexible human behavior in the face of unique current situations, are the main areas of inquiry by which Dr. Salisbury and his team try to detect the underlying brain abnormalities giving rise to psychosis. Understanding of the basic dysfunctions, in turn, will lead to earlier identification, better interventions, and improved outcome in schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders.