The Department of Psychiatry Welcomes New Faculty Members
The Department of Psychiatry extends a warm welcome to four new faculty members:
Traci Kennedy, PhD (Assistant Professor of Psychiatry)
Dr. Kennedy earned her PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan, having completed her psychology internship at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. She then received postdoctoral training in child & adolescent psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where she focused on investigating links among attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and substance use. Following academic and clinical appointments at the University of Pennsylvania and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and in the Pitt Department of Psychology , Dr. Kennedy joined Pitt Psychiatry as a postdoctoral scholar in the federally funded Developmental Alcohol Research Training T32 program under the mentorship of Brooke Molina, PhD, and Sarah Pedersen, PhD. Dr. Kennedy’s current research focuses on the prevention of problematic alcohol use for young people with ADHD.
James Latronica, MD (Assistant Professor of Psychiatry)
Dr. Latronica received his DO from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. He completed family medicine residency at Clarion Hospital (Clarion, PA), followed by an addiction medicine fellowship at Penn State University Hershey Medical Center. Dr. Latronica is a member of the American Society of Addiction Medicine and an associate editor at the Journal of Addictive Diseases. At UPMC Western Psychiatric Hospital, Dr. Latronica will provide clinical services at the Center for Psychiatric and Chemical Dependency Services (CPCDS) and the Narcotic Addiction Treatment Program (NATP).
Jessie Northrup, PhD (Research Assistant Professor of Psychiatry)
After completing her clinical psychology internship at UPMC Western Psychiatric Hospital, Dr. Northrup earned her PhD in clinical and developmental psychology from the University of Pittsburgh. She then undertook postdoctoral training in the Department of Psychiatry in the federally funded T32 Clinical Research Training for Psychologists Postdoctoral Training Program under the mentorship of Carla Mazefsky, PhD, and Alison Hipwell, PhD. Dr. Northrup is currently participating in the Clinical and Translational Science Scholars Program (KL2), offered by the Institute for Clinical Research Education (ICRE) and the Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) at the University of Pittsburgh. Her current research focuses on emotion regulation in those with autism spectrum disorder.
James Wilson, PhD (Assistant Professor of Psychiatry)
Dr. Wilson earned his PhD in statistics and operations research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his research focuses on the development and theoretical analysis of scalable and interpretable techniques to analyze complex network data. Following an academic appointment in the University of San Francisco Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Dr. Wilson joined the Pitt Department of Psychiatry to advance the application of multilayer network modeling, inference, and other statistical approaches to brain and behavior research.