News

Congratulations to Amy Byrd, PhD, who was recently named an Association for Psychological Science (APS) Rising Star! The APS Rising Star designation is presented to outstanding APS members in the earliest stages of their research careers after completing doctoral training. Dr. Byrd’s research is focused on the neurobiological processes underlying the development and persistence of reactive aggression in adolescents...

Individuals with schizophrenia can experience auditory hallucinations and delusions, as well as disrupted cognitive and sensory processes that may result in functional impairment and long-term disability. In the cerebral cortex, pyramidal cells are essential to the cognitive and sensory processes that may be disrupted in schizophrenia. Postmortem studies of individuals with schizophrenia consistently show deficits...

The Department of Psychiatry Office of Residency Training (ORT)’s Respect, Responsibility and Empowerment in Medicine (RREM) Residency Curriculum is a required, four-year curriculum designed to educate Pitt Psychiatry residents on the social constructs of bias, how to serve as allies and advocates, and how to apply these skills and knowledge in the clinical and academic settings. Launched in January 2021, RREM...

Beatriz Luna, PhD (Staunton Professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry and Professor of Psychology) has received a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Method to Extend Research in Time (MERIT) Award. Dr. Luna is an internationally recognized developmental neuroscientist. Her research focuses on characterizing the changes in brain function that subserved the maturation of cognition by bridging developmental...

Acute stressors affect how we perceive the world, allocate our mental energy, and make decisions. Although the prefrontal cortex is known to be an essential brain region involved in adaptive behaviors related to stress, our understanding of the individual cell types and synaptic plasticity mechanisms in the prefrontal cortex is limited. In a recent study published in Neuron, a team of investigators including co...

Among scientists working in the field of autism spectrum disorder research, two models represent the most common understanding of the disorder’s genetic underpinnings: one posits that rare risk variants invariably have large impact on liability; the other emphasizes the major role played by common variations with small effects. On a population level, the common variation likely plays the dominant role in liability...