University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine Promotes Layla Banihashemi, PhD, to Associate Professor of Psychiatry
We are delighted to announce that Layla Banihashemi, PhD, has been promoted to Associate Professor of Psychiatry by the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
Dr. Banihashemi earned her PhD in neuroscience from the University of Pittsburgh. She then joined the Department of Psychiatry as a postdoctoral scholar in the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute T32 training program in cardiovascular behavioral medicine. Dr. Banihashemi received additional postdoctoral training in neuroimaging and stress reactivity, and neuroimaging and childhood adversity. She joined the Department of Psychiatry faculty in 2014.
Dr. Banihashemi’s translational research program is focused on investigating central visceral circuits—the neural correlates of body-brain connections, critical for stress response—in both animal and human models. As a graduate student, Dr. Banihashemi studied the structure and function of central visceral circuits (CVCs), and their role in stress responses, in preclinical animal models. She was the first to demonstrate the lasting effects of stress during the juvenile period in rodents. Dr. Banihashemi’s postdoctoral research examined hypothalamic and limbic forebrain stress reactivity. Her National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)-funded K01 career development award enabled her to study how childhood experiences (including trauma and socioeconomic deprivation) correlate with CVCs in humans. Building upon this prior research, she currently leads an NIMH R01 examining multiple domains of deprivation (e.g., neighborhood, cognitive, financial), and using ultra-high-field magnetic resonance imaging at 7T to examine CVCs.
Dr. Banihashemi has received multiple awards throughout her training and early career. Recently, conference abstracts prepared by Dr. Banihashemi were noted as newsworthy at the American Psychosomatic Society annual meeting, and highly ranked by the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine annual meeting.
Dr. Banihashemi’s contributions to the educational missions of the Department, the School of Medicine, and the University of Pittsburgh include teaching medical and graduate students, as well as psychiatry residents. As a mentor, Dr. Banihashemi is known for providing remarkably hands-on training to mentees. She serves on the mentoring faculty of the National Institute of Mental Health T32 Bioengineering in Psychiatry Predoctoral Training Program at the University of Pittsburgh, working with bioengineering students receiving training in the models and constructs of mental health research.
“Dr. Banihashemi is an outstanding scholar whose unique and important line of research has substantially increased our understanding of how childhood experiences relate to stress response and neural activation later in life,” said David Lewis, MD (Chair, Department of Psychiatry). “A true academic role model, she is highly valued by her colleagues, collaborators, students, and trainees.”
Please join us in congratulating Dr. Banihashemi!