We are pleased to announce that Khaled Moussawi, MD, PhD, has joined the faculty as Assistant Professor of Psychiatry. Dr. Moussawi joins Pitt Psychiatry from the National Institute on Drug Abuse Intramural Research Program, where he was a clinical/postdoctoral fellow. Dr. Moussawi received his MD, and a PhD in neuroscience, from the Medical University of South Carolina before completing residency training in...

We are delighted to announce that the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has honored Boris Birmaher, MD (Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Endowed Chair in Early Onset Bipolar Disease), with the 2020 Simon Bolivar Award. The award states that it honors a prominent advocate for Hispanics. Dr. Birmaher was born in Cali, Colombia, and earned his medical degree from the Valle College of Medicine in Colombia...

The 37th annual Pittsburgh Schizophrenia Conference presented advances in schizophrenia research to a virtual audience of more than 300 psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses, social workers, and researchers, as well as patients and their families. At UPMC Western Psychiatric Hospital (WPH), K.N. Roy Chengappa, MD, Professor of Psychiatry, is Chief, Comprehensive Recovery Services (CRS), which serves patients with...

It is widely believed that naming emotions can promote mental and physical health. However, little is known about how the use of wide emotional vocabularies is associated with emotional functioning. From a linguistic perspective, emotional vocabularies can be understood within two domains: active vocabulary, words that an individual uses spontaneously, and passive vocabulary, the full range of words that an...

We are delighted to share that Kenneth Nash, MD (Professor and Vice Chair for Clinical Affairs, Department of Psychiatry, and Professor of Pediatrics), has been named a member of the American College of Psychiatrists. Members are psychiatrists who have demonstrated outstanding competence in the field, and who have achieved national recognition in clinical practice, research, academic leadership, and/or teaching. Dr...

The ongoing success of Pitt Psychiatry’s innovative research program is in large part thanks to the indispensable research staff who run labs and provide administrative oversight for grants. Meet five members of our research staff who recently received Department of Psychiatry Research Employee of the Year awards: Dan Galeza (Administrative Liaison, Neuropsychology Research Program) Dan Galeza was nominated by...

In a hundred-year-old film, a man is seen looking at a bowl of soup, then at a child in a coffin, then at a woman on a divan. While the film shows the exact same footage of the man three times, interspersed with the other images, audiences perceived that the man reacted to each scene with separate and distinct facial expressions. This phenomenon suggested that audience interpretations of his expression were...

Highly responsive to resident feedback, the Department of Psychiatry Office of Residency Training (ORT) adapts existing programs and develops new initiatives on an ongoing basis to meet the needs of UPMC Western Psychiatric Hospital (WPH) trainees. Below, Michael Travis, MD (Senior Director for Postgraduate Physician Training), Sansea Jacobson, MD (Director, Child & Adolescent Psychiatry and Triple Board Training)...

This month, Jeanie Knox Houtsinger (Department of Psychiatry Director of Academic Affairs) celebrates a thirty-year career at UPMC, the last 13 of those years in the Office of the Chair of the Department of Psychiatry. A fount of institutional knowledge who has dedicated her career to supporting our scientists and clinicians, it is common across the Department for the most obscure or vexing questions to be met with...

Individuals diagnosed with borderline personality disorder often report leading stressful and tumultuous lives. Research suggests that they are likely to experience more prospective stressors (known as stress generation), and more emotional reactivity following those stressors (known as stress reactivity) than individuals without borderline personality disorder, including those diagnosed with other psychiatric...