Two recent presentations offered audiences from the Department of Psychiatry and beyond a nuanced look at health disparities and trauma in psychiatry. Eraka Bath, MD (Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, University of California / Los Angeles) delivered a Department of Psychiatry Distinguished Scientist Lecture, “Addressing Reproductive...

StatsEye (“Stat-Psy”), a newly established collaborative, engages individuals who are excited about developing and applying novel statistical methods for psychiatry. We spoke with Meredith Wallace, PhD (Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Statistics, and Biostatistics), and Dana Tudorascu, PhD (Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Biostatistics), who formed the group in collaboration with James Wilson, PhD...

We are delighted to announce that Jessica Gannon, MD, has been promoted to Associate Professor of Psychiatry by the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Dr. Gannon earned her MD from the University of Kansas School of Medicine and completed her psychiatric residency at UPMC Western Psychiatric Hospital (WPH). She joined the University of Pittsburgh Department of Psychiatry as assistant professor and was...

Please join us in welcoming the 2021-2022 Clinical Psychology Internship class! The American Psychological Association-accredited program is co-led by Tina Goldstein, PhD, and Michele Levine, PhD. This yearlong experience adheres to a clinical science model of training and professional development, emphasizing research and clinical training integration, as well as a commitment to empirically informed approaches to...

Alexandre Dombrovski, MD (Associate Professor of Psychiatry) is an expert in both geriatric psychiatry and suicide. Using the methods of decision neuroscience, he seeks to understand what disruptions in decision processes result in disadvantageous decisions, including the tragic decision to end one’s life. We spoke to Dr. Dombrovski about his work in elucidating the roles of learning and decision-making in...

We are delighted to announce that Matthew MacDonald, PhD, has been promoted to Associate Professor of Psychiatry by the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Dr. MacDonald earned his PhD in pharmacology from the University of Pennsylvania and completed his postdoctoral research at the University of Pittsburgh Department of Psychiatry in the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)-funded Training in...

Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), the most common childhood neurodevelopmental disorder, is characterized by inattention and/or hyperactivity and impulsivity that are inappropriate to the developmental stage and interfere with daily life. Two of these symptoms, hyperactivity and impulsivity, tend to decline with age. However, inattention symptoms more often persist into adulthood, even among adults...

For individuals with schizophrenia, impairment in the ability to selectively focus attention on some environmental stimuli while ignoring others is associated with worse symptoms and poor functional outcomes. Moreover, these cognitive impairments are largely resistant to treatment through medication. To improve understanding of how dysfunction in the neural selective attention system contributes to these cognitive...

We are delighted to announce that Kymberly Young, PhD, has been promoted to Associate Professor of Psychiatry by the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Dr. Young earned her PhD in psychology from American University, then conducted postdoctoral research in clinical neuroscience at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research. Dr. Young joined the University of Pittsburgh Department of Psychiatry at the rank...

Clinical trials intended to aid in the development of effective antidepressant medication has been hindered by antidepressant placebo effects. These effects may involve cortical and subcortical endogenous opioid signaling, yet the mechanism through which opioid release affects mood remains unclear. In a recent Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging paper, Pitt Psychiatry investigators...