New Faculty - Marianne Seney, PhD

Department Welcomes Marianne Seney, PhD 
as an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry

Please join us in welcoming Marianne Seney, PhD to the Department of Psychiatry faculty. Dr. Seney's research focuses on the cellular/molecular bases of sexual dimorphisms in the vulnerability to develop mood disorders using relevant rodent models.  

As a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst and with support from a predoctoral National Research Service Award, she studied the development of sex differences in various species and in different regions of the nervous system.  This work laid the foundation for her postdoctoral training and research in the University of Pittsburgh's Translational Neuroscience Program.  With support from another National Research Service Award, Dr. Seney's postdoctoral research focused on studying the underlying bases of sexual dimorphism of major depression, and increasing our understanding of these sex differences in order to identify novel targets and/or provide new research trajectories for development of better, possibly sex-specific treatments.  She is now expanding that work through a K01 career development award to examine the role of genetic sex in affect regulation and a NARSAD Young Investigator Grant to examine the role of GABA inhibitory neurons in affect regulation.

Throughout her undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral training, Dr. Seney has been recognized for her academic achievements and disseminated her work through presentations and publications.  She was selected for the Howard Hughes Summer Fellowship program (2000) and the Elizabeth Young New Investigator Award for the Organization for the Study of Sex Differences (2013).  Dr. Seney has also co-written a number of peer-reviewed articles published in highly-rated scientific journals including papers for which she is the lead author that appeared in the Journal of Neurobiology (2006) and Neurobiology of Disease (2012, 2015).  She also has presented her research at poster sessions at a number of annual meetings of professional societies including the Society for Neuroscience, the Society of Biological Psychiatry, and American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. Dr. Seney was also recently elected as a Junior Investigator Councilor for the Organization for the Study of Sex Differences.    

We look forward to Dr. Seney's ongoing contributions to the Department and the field.