News

We are pleased to announce that Adriane Soehner, PhD, has been promoted to Associate Professor of Psychiatry by the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

Dr. Soehner earned her PhD in clinical science from the University of California, Berkeley, having completed a clinical psychology internship at UPMC Western Psychiatric Hospital. She then conducted postdoctoral research training in the Department’s National Heart Lung and Blood Institute-funded Translational Research Training in Sleep Medicine T32 program. 

Trained as a clinical psychologist and affective neuroscientist, Dr. Soehner’s research integrates neurodevelopment, sleep, and mood disorders. She uses novel methodological, statistical, and experimental methodologies to answer critical questions about the role of sleep-circadian process in emotion regulation and dysfunction in youth and young adults, with the goal of elucidating treatment targets for sleep and circadian health during sensitive developmental periods. Dr. Soehner was the first to demonstrate that actigraphy-assessed sleep was associated with brain maturation, and she has shown that that brain-sleep relationships differ with age. She has also employed advanced statistical methods to examine dimensional sleep health.

Dr. Soehner serves as contact principal investigator (PI) on a multiple PI, multi-site National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) U01 award focused on applying computational methods to identify sleep signatures predictive of mental health outcomes among youth in pediatric primary care. The Pediatric Precision Sleep Network is designed to leverage multiple data types and advanced computational methods to identify sleep signatures, link these signatures to prospective changes in transdiagnostic mental health, and develop sleep-informed mental health screening algorithms. In addition, Dr. Soehner leads a NIMH-funded R01 focused on uncovering the circadian and reward mechanisms that drive locomotor activation and mania spectrum risk in young adults who have exhibited subthreshold mania symptoms, as well as an NIMH R21 examining whether neuro-affective processes underlying antidepressant response to light therapy in adults can be used effectively with adolescents. Dr. Soehner is site PI of a Department of Defense Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II Grant, and serves as co-investigator on two Department of Psychiatry P50 grants.

Dr. Soehner has authored multiple, original, peer-reviewed articles in top-tier journals in the fields of sleep and chronobiology research, and has received multiple honors and recognitions, including the prestigious Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science.

An outstanding teacher, Dr. Soehner has worked with students and trainees at all levels, and is well-known and highly admired for fostering a collaborative lab culture and skillfully guiding mentees through the multifaceted process of developing and testing a research question, as well as disseminating findings through published papers and presentations. 

“Dr. Soehner has provided seminal insights into how sleep and circadian rhythms develop during adolescence and into the neural activity patterns underlying mood dysregulation in youth, as well as demonstrating how innovative sleep and circadian interventions can be used to improve mood,” said David Lewis, MD (Chair, Department of Psychiatry). “She is a highly regarded and valued member of the scientific community, a tremendous resource for addressing the challenges of complex data management and analysis, and a superb teacher and mentor who has made tremendous contributions to training the next generation of scientists.”

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Soehner!