Faculty

Alexandre Y Dombrovski, MD

Alexandre Y Dombrovski, MD

Pittsburgh Foundation Endowed Professor in Brain and Mind Research and Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology

Contact Details

3811 O'Hara St.
Pittsburgh
 
PA
 
15213
Email
Website
Decision Neuroscience and Psychopathology Lab
Assistant
Mandy Collier
collieral@upmc.edu

Education & Training

MD
Sechenov Moscow Medical Academy
Psychiatry, Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic of UPMC
Geriatric Psychiatry, Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic of UPMC

Research Interests

Decision-making in psychopathology; Reinforcement learning
Selected Research Publications & Products
  1. Allen, TA, Hallquist, MN, Dombrovski, AY. (2024) The dark side of mentalizing: Learning signals in the default network during social exchanges support cooperation and exploitation. PNAS, 121 (29) e2307221121.
  2. Tsypes A, Hallquist MN, Ianni A, Kaurin A, Wright AGC, Dombrovski AY. (2024) Exploration-exploitation and suicidal behavior in borderline personality and depression. JAMA Psychiatry, 81;(10):1010-1019. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2024.1796
  3. Hallquist, MN, Hwang, K, Luna, B, Dombrovski, AY. (2024) Reinforcement-based option competition in the dorsal stream during exploration/exploitation of a continuous space. Science Advances, 10 (8). PMID: 38394198 PMCID: PMC10889364
  4. Brown VM, Hallquist MN, Frank MJ & Dombrovski AY. (2022). Humans adaptively resolve the explore-exploit dilemma under cognitive constraints: Evidence from a multi-armed bandit task. Cognition 229, 105233. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105233.
  5. Dombrovski AY, Luna B, Hallquist MN. (2020) Differential reinforcement encoding along the hippocampal long axis helps resolve the explore-exploit dilemma. Nature Communications, 26;11(1):5407

Clinical Interests

Late-life suicide; Late-life depression
Selected Clinical Publications & Products
  1. Pecia, M, Chen, J, Karp, JF, Dombrovski, AY. (2023) Dynamic feedback between antidepressant placebo expectancies and mood: contributions of dorsal attention and salience networks. JAMA Psychiatry, 80 (4), 389-398.
  2. Allen TA, Hallquist MN, Wright AGC, Dombrovski AY. (2022) Negative affectivity and disinhibition as moderators of an interpersonal pathway to suicidal behavior in borderline personality disorder. Clinical Psychological Science. SAGE Publications Inc; 2022 Jan 3.
  3. Tsypes A, Szanto K, Bridge JA, Brown VM, Keilp JG, Dombrovski AY (2022). Delay discounting in suicidal behavior: Myopic preference or inconsistent valuation? J Abnorm Psychol. 131(1), 3444. doi: 10.1037/abn0000717. PMID: 34843269.
  4. Szucs A, Szanto K, Wright AGC, Dombrovski AY. (2020) Personality of late- and early-onset elderly suicide attempters. Int J Geriatr Psychiatry. Apr;35(4):384-395. doi: 10.1002/gps.5254. Epub 2020 Jan 7. PMID: 31894591; PMCID: PMC7291767.
  5. Dombrovski AY, Hallquist MN, Brown VM, Wilson J, Szanto K. (2019) Value-based choice, contingency learning, and suicidal behavior in mid- and late-life depression. Biol Psychiatry. Mar 15;85(6):506516. PMCID: PMC6380943

Education Interests

Research mentorship
Selected Education Publications & Products
  1. Brown VM, Price R, Dombrovski AY (2023). Anxiety as a disorder of uncertainty: Implications for understanding maladaptive anxiety, anxious avoidance, and exposure therapy. CABN, 23 (3), 844-868
  2. Dombrovski AY, Hallquist MN. Search for solutions, learning, simulation, and choice processes in suicidal behavior. WIREs Cognitive Science. 2021; e1561
  3. Kotov R, Cicero DC, Conway CC, DeYoung CG, Dombrovski AY, Eaton NR, First MB, Forbes MK, Hyman SE, Jonas KG, Krueger RF, Latzman RD, Li JJ, Nelson BD, Regier DA, Rodriguez-Seijas C, Ruggero CJ, Simms LJ, Skodol AE, Wright AGC. (2022). Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) in psychiatric practice and research. Psychological Medicine. Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 June 2022.
  4. Hallquist MN, Dombrovski AY. Reinforcement learning approaches in clinical computational neuroscience. In: The Cambridge Handbook of Research Methods in Clinical Psychology edited by Aidan G. C. Wright and Michael N. Hallquist. Cambridge University Press (2020).
  5. Dombrovski AY, Hallquist MN. The decision neuroscience perspective on suicidal behavior: Evidence and hypotheses. Current Opinion in Psychiatry, October 14, 2016.

JAMA Psychiatry: Exploration-Exploitation and Suicidal Behavior in Borderline Personality Disorder and Depression

Drs. Tsypes and Dombrovski

People who survive suicide attempts usually come to regret their choice of suicide attempt over constructive alternatives, suggesting that this choice is often an error of decision-making. In a crisis, decisions are often made during a complex sensorimotor interaction, with real or perceived time pressure, and a vast number of options that may become available and vanish dynamically. While there may be many choices...

New Research Captures How Learning to Cooperate Relates to “Dark” Personality Traits

Dr. Timothy Allen

A new study published in PNAS by University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers describes how two personality traits, callousness and exploitativeness, are related to the way humans learn to cooperate in interpersonal relationships, and how this learning unfolds in the brain. The study represents an important step toward understanding whether differences in the way we learn from others impact the types of...

Science Advances: Reward-Based Option Competition in Human Dorsal Stream and Transition from Stochastic Exploration to Exploitation in Continuous Space

Dr. Alex Dombrovski

Organisms face a difficult dilemma between exploiting options that are known to be good and exploring alternative options that might be even better. This explore-exploit dilemma becomes especially hard when we move rapidly through a changing environment. As our primate ancestors adapted to hunting and foraging on swinging tree branches, they evolved dynamic maps of their environment in the dorsal or “where”...

University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine Promotes Alex Dombrovski, MD, to Professor of Psychiatry

Alex Dombrovski, MD

We are pleased to announce that Alex Dombrovski, MD, has been promoted to Professor of Psychiatry by the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Dr. Dombrovski received his MD from Moscow Medical Academy in Russia, then undertook an internship in internal medicine and residency in psychiatry. He completed psychiatry residency training and a geriatric psychiatry fellowship at UPMC Western Psychiatric Hospital...

JAMA Psychiatry: Dynamic Feedback Between Antidepressant Placebo Expectancies and Mood

Marta Peciña, MD, PhD (Associate Professor of Psychiatry), conducts research focused on the mechanisms of antidepressant treatment response, and uses placebos to investigate how expectancies and learning mechanisms impact mood improvement. In a recent paper published in JAMA Psychiatry, Dr. Peciña and investigators including Alex Dombrovski, MD (Pittsburgh Foundation Endowed Professor in Brain and Mind Research and...