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Please join us in congratulating Kurt Ackerman, MD, PhD on his promotion to the rank of Associate Professor of Psychiatry by the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Dr. Ackerman earned his medical degree from the University of Rochester and is a graduate of the General Psychiatry residency training program at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic (WPIC). In 1997 Dr. Ackerman was appointed to the Pitt...

Pathological Basis for Deficient Excitatory Drive to Cortical Parvalbumin Interneurons in Schizophrenia Chung DW, Fish KN and Lewis DA American Journal of Psychiatry, 2016 Nov 1;173(11):1131-1139. Deficient excitatory drive to parvalbumin-containing cortical interneurons is proposed as a key neural substrate for altered gamma oscillations and cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia. However, a pathological entity...

Prefrontal Cortex to Accumbens Projections in Sleep Regulation of Reward Liu Z, Wang Y, Cai L, Li Y, Chen B, Dong Y, and Huang YH Journal of Neuroscience, Published online, 2016 Sleep profoundly affects the emotional and motivational state. In humans and animals, loss of sleep often results in enhanced motivation for reward, which has direct implications for health risks as well as potential benefits. Dr. Yanhua...

Parsing Heterogeneity in the Brain Connectivity of Depressed and Healthy Adults during Positive Mood Price RB, Lane S, Gates K, Kraynak TE, Horner MS, Thase ME and Siegle GJ Biological Psychiatry, Published online, 2016 Psychiatric diagnoses exhibit significant heterogeneity in symptom presentation. Major depression, for example, has 16,400 possible combinations of symptoms contained within the nine DSM-5 criteria...

Dr. Triptish Bhatia first became interested in the cognitive benefits of yoga early in her research career. As a trainee in an NIH funded training grant intended to improve research infrastructure in India, she began thinking about how yoga may fill in the shortcomings of antipsychotic medication while she was visiting Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic of UPMC (WPIC). However, her mentor at the time, Dr...

The Department of Psychiatry is honored to announce that Dr. Charles F. Reynolds III has been presented with the prestigious Pardes Humanitarian Prize in Mental Health by the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF). This international prize recognizes a physician, scientist or public citizen whose extraordinary contribution has made a profound and lasting impact by improving the lives of people suffering from...