News

We are delighted to announce that Kymberly Young, PhD, has received conferral of tenure at the rank of associate professor by the University of Pittsburgh.

Dr. Young is an expert in the neural mechanisms of depression, and her work focuses on altered autobiographical memory in the illness, the translation of mechanistic findings from those findings to neurofeedback strategies, and the development of scalable, cost-effective interventions for depression. Dr. Young has pioneered research on neurofeedback of the amygdala response, testing the hypothesis that improving neural flexibility will improve depression symptom severity. She has shown that individuals with depression experienced high amygdala activation to negative stimuli, and low amygdala activation to positive stimuli. She found this double dissociation pattern of responses to be a marker for risk for depression, as it was found in individuals at high familial risk for depression who had not yet developed a depressive episode. This finding normalized with successful treatment, and its persistence after a course of treatment predicted relapse. Dr. Young then tested the therapeutic effectiveness of giving depressed patients feedback on their amygdala response to a positive autobiographical memory and demonstrated that real-time feedback, coupled with coaching on how to increase amygdala activation, resulted in reduced depressive symptoms. 

Dr. Young currently leads a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) R01 clinical trial to test the efficacy of increasing amygdala reactivity to positive stimuli via real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) neurofeedback training. In a second NIMH R01 study, Dr. Young is using fMRI during autobiographical memory recall to determine vulnerability or resilience to developing major depressive disorder in young adults. She is additionally principal investigator of an NIMH R61/R33 grant. Her prior funding includes a K99/R00 award from the NIMH and a NARSAD Young Investigator award. Dr. Young has disseminated her research in influential psychiatry and psychology journals, in book chapters, and though numerous invited talks. She is an associate member of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP), as well as an editorial board member with Brain Sciences and PLOS ONE.

Dr. Young has made substantial contributions to the educational missions of the Department and to the University of Pittsburgh, having taught undergraduate, graduate, and medical students on topics including affective neuroscience, memory and cognition, and the analysis of psychological data. She is a member of the faculty training committee of two NIMH T32 programs, and serves on the Center for Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh (CNUP) training faculty.

“Dr. Young is an innovative, generative, and impactful investigator, who conducts cutting-edge, mechanistic neuroimaging research that is making important advances in intervention for individuals with mental health disorders,” said David Lewis, MD (Chair, Department of Psychiatry). “She has earned well-deserved national and international recognition for her research, and is also an outstanding teacher and mentor.”

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Young!