We are delighted to announce that Meredith Spada, MD (Assistant Professor of Psychiatry), has received the 2022 Association for Academic Psychiatry (AAP) Early Career Development Award, which recognizes promising early-career faculty and provides them with resources to further their academic teaching careers. Dr. Spada earned her MD from Penn State University. She completed residency training in adult psychiatry at...

An international consortium of scientists from fields including psychiatry, genetics, genomics, pediatrics, and statistics have published a study in Nature Genetics reporting the discovery of 185 genes significantly associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and more than 300 genes associated with autism or other types of developmental delay. The consortium evaluated genetic data from a cohort of more than 63...

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has awarded Pitt Psychiatry a Center of Excellence (P50) grant renewal for Enhancing Triage and Utilization for Depression and Emergent Suicidality (ETUDES), led by David Brent, MD (Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry, Pediatrics, Epidemiology, and Clinical and Translational Science, and Endowed Chair in Suicide Studies). The Center is co-led by Bruce Rollman, MD...

Pitt Psychiatry extends a warm welcome to two new faculty members: Piper Carroll, MD (Assistant Professor of Psychiatry) Dr. Carroll earned her MD from the University of Maryland, Baltimore in 2017. After completing general psychiatry residency training at UPMC Western Psychiatric Hospital (WPH), Dr. Carroll undertook fellowships in child and adolescent psychiatry and community psychiatry at WPH. During residency...

Pitt Psychiatry extends a warm welcome to two new faculty members: Laurie Compère, PhD (Research Instructor in Psychiatry) Dr. Compère earned her PhD in Psychology and completed two years of postdoctoral research training at Sorbonne University in Paris, France. In 2018, she joined the University of Pittsburgh as a postdoctoral scholar under the mentorship of Kymberly Young, PhD (Associate Professor of Psychiatry)...

Investigators including Jessie Northrup, PhD (Assistant Professor of Psychiatry), and Carla Mazefsky, PhD (Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology), from Pitt Psychiatry, have conducted a study of how emotion dysregulation—challenges in modulating the intensity and duration of emotional reactions—may relate to aggressive or self-injurious behaviors in autistic individuals. The study, published in Autism Research...

We are thrilled to announce that Susanne Ahmari, MD, PhD (Associate Professor of Psychiatry), has been awarded an inaugural Pitt Health Sciences Ascending Star Award, which recognizes highly productive, creative, mid-career faculty members from across the Health Sciences. Dr. Ahmari is an expert in the identification of the molecular, cellular, and circuit mechanisms underlying obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)...

Substance use disorder is a public health crisis for which new treatments are urgently needed. In rare cases, regional brain damage (for example, following a stroke) can lead to addiction remission, and such cases can be used to identify therapeutic targets for neuromodulation. A group of investigators, including Khaled Moussawi, MD, PhD (Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Neurology, and Bioengineering), from Pitt...

Although multiple specific sleep characteristics can contribute to risk factors for alcohol and cannabis use and related problems in later adolescence and young adulthood, most research has examined a limited range of sleep characteristics within a narrow age span. In a recent study, Pitt Psychiatry investigators including Brant Hasler, PhD (Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Clinical and...

Pitt Psychiatry extends a warm welcome to two new faculty members who have joined our Department: Jihui Lee, PhD (Assistant Professor of Psychiatry) Dr. Lee earned her PhD in biostatistics at Columbia University, and completed postdoctoral training at Weill Cornell Medicine in the Division of Biostatistics and Epidemiology (Department of Healthcare Policy and Research). Dr. Lee’s research focuses on the analysis of...