Physical distancing, stay-at-home orders and economic uncertainty resulting from the current COVID-19 pandemic have raised behavioral health concerns for many people. Below is a selection of strategies from Department of Psychiatry faculty and trainees on how to cope with the drastic alteration of our home, social and professional lives. For Kids and Adolescents Rameshwari Tumuluru, MD, an expert in helping...

Research has demonstrated that impaired decision-making is a key factor in the onset of suicidal behavior and can manifest as difficulty choosing between two similarly valued options or as impulsivity in decision-making. To better understand the potential relationship between decision-making and suicidal behavior, scientists have examined the neural underpinnings of each and found disrupted ventromedial prefrontal...

The Department of Psychiatry is delighted to announce that Dana Tudorascu, PhD, has joined the faculty at the rank of associate professor. Dr. Tudorascu earned her PhD in biostatistics from the University of Pittsburgh. During graduate school, she gained invaluable experience in statistical methods, fMRI and other imaging techniques, as well as in neuroimaging data analysis from Positron Emission Tomography (PET)...

We are delighted to announce that Yanhua Huang, PhD, has been appointed Tenured Associate Professor of Psychiatry by the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Huang’s research focuses on the role of changes in sleep on neural plasticity in reward circuits, with a focus on the association between sleep loss and addiction. She is currently the PI of five federally funded grants, including a National Institute on Drug Abuse...

The Department of Psychiatry congratulates Boris Birmaher, MD (Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Endowed Chair in Early Onset Bipolar Disease), on his election to the prestigious Association of American Physicians (AAP). Dr. Birmaher, an internationally recognized expert in child and adolescent psychiatry, has made exceptional, field-changing contributions to the study of bipolar disorder in children and...

Recent research has shown that forms of suicidal behavior predict future occurrences of the same type of behavior. As suicide rates have increased nationwide in recent years, so has non-fatal suicidal behavior—including suicidal ideation, planning for an attempt and making an attempt. In an article published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, Maria Kovacs, PhD, reported on the impact of impaired mood repair—the...

Treatment for substance use disorders, devastating and pervasive illnesses, are complicated by a high propensity for relapse. Relapse can occur when an individual encounters a familiar stimulus that has, in the past, induced cravings. One strategy for potentially preventing relapse is to weaken these maladaptive memories. Two approaches for doing so include interfering with memory reconsolidation—disrupting the...

The delivery of effective medical and psychiatric treatments in later life can be complicated by the presence of multiple co-occurring conditions. Three such conditions—obesity, diabetes and dementia—co-occur in older adults more frequently than can be expected by chance. While studies have demonstrated that diabetes, high blood pressure and high body mass index in midlife predict dementia in late life, in late...

We are delighted to announce that Sarah Pedersen, PhD, has been promoted to Associate Professor of Psychiatry by the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Dr. Pedersen graduated from the University of Missouri with a PhD in clinical psychology. During graduate school, she completed a clinical psychology internship at UPMC Western Psychiatric Hospital (WPH) and stayed in Pittsburgh as a postdoctoral fellow in...

We are delighted to announce that Ryan Logan, PhD, has been awarded the 2020 International Behavioural and Neural Genetics Society (IBANGS) Young Scientist Award. The Young Scientist Award honors an early-career investigator in the field of behavioral and neural genetics. When selecting the recipient for this prestigious honor, IBANGS considers the scientific importance of research discovered, record of achievement...