Faculty

Melanie Grubisha, MD, PhD (Assistant Professor of Psychiatry), investigates the molecular underpinnings of psychiatric and neurological disease, focusing on the molecular pathways responsible for both typical and aberrant dendritic development across adolescence. Two recent papers in Neurobiology of Disease describe recent findings on the association between dendritic alterations and risk for schizophrenia...

Individuals with schizophrenia can experience auditory hallucinations and delusions, as well as disrupted cognitive and sensory processes that may result in functional impairment and long-term disability. In the cerebral cortex, pyramidal cells are essential to the cognitive and sensory processes that may be disrupted in schizophrenia. Postmortem studies of individuals with schizophrenia consistently show deficits...

Schizophrenia is a polygenic disorder with common, rare, and structural variants. These variants each contribute only a small fraction of overall risk for developing the disease. To improve understanding of synaptic and functional deterioration shared by large proportions of individuals with schizophrenia, scientists including Melanie Grubisha, MD, PhD; Matthew MacDonald, PhD; David Lewis, MD; and Robert Sweet, MD...

Last week we reinvented our annual in-person Research Day as a virtual Research Matinee, a Department-wide exploration of innovative research, career reflections and honors for outstanding faculty and staff. Attendees included nearly 200 Psychiatry faculty, trainees, and staff, who tuned in for plenary speaker Mary Phillips, MD, MD (Cantab), followed by the perennially popular Speed Dat(a)ing, in which six...

This summer marks the 10th year of the Undergraduate Research Fellowship Program, funded by the NIMH Conte Center for Translational Mental Health Research. The competitive 10-week summer program provides undergraduate students studying neuroscience, biology and psychology, among other fields, the opportunity to conduct hands-on, cutting-edge neuroscience research under the mentorship of clinical and basic...