The Department of Psychiatry Office of Residency Training (ORT)’s Respect, Responsibility and Empowerment in Medicine (RREM) Residency Curriculum is a required, four-year curriculum designed to educate Pitt Psychiatry residents on the social constructs of bias, how to serve as allies and advocates, and how to apply these skills and knowledge in the clinical and academic settings. Launched in January 2021, RREM...

Beatriz Luna, PhD (Staunton Professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry and Professor of Psychology) has received a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Method to Extend Research in Time (MERIT) Award. Dr. Luna is an internationally recognized developmental neuroscientist. Her research focuses on characterizing the changes in brain function that subserved the maturation of cognition by bridging developmental...

Acute stressors affect how we perceive the world, allocate our mental energy, and make decisions. Although the prefrontal cortex is known to be an essential brain region involved in adaptive behaviors related to stress, our understanding of the individual cell types and synaptic plasticity mechanisms in the prefrontal cortex is limited. In a recent study published in Neuron, a team of investigators including co...

Among scientists working in the field of autism spectrum disorder research, two models represent the most common understanding of the disorder’s genetic underpinnings: one posits that rare risk variants invariably have large impact on liability; the other emphasizes the major role played by common variations with small effects. On a population level, the common variation likely plays the dominant role in liability...

Bipolar disorder (BD) is a familial illness that is associated with functional impairment and increased risk for suicide and substance use. The disorder is highly heritable, and research has identified many common genetic variants associated with risk for the disorder. Studies including the Pittsburgh Bipolar Offspring Study (BIOS) have found that offspring of parents with BD are at elevated, specific risk to...

The Department of Psychiatry and UPMC Western Psychiatric Hospital (WPH) invite you to attend the 2022 Clinician-Educator Showcase. This virtual event will take place on March 24, 2022, from 12:00-4:30 p.m. This annual event highlights the outstanding work of our clinician-educators, and offers faculty, staff, and trainees the opportunity to learn about promising clinical innovations and the latest quality...

Determining how brain activity gives rise to compulsive behaviors is vital for understanding the neural underpinnings of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Individuals with OCD display disrupted performance and abnormal lateral orbitofrontal cortex activity during reversal learning tasks, yet it is unknown whether compulsions and reversal learning deficits share a common neural substrate. A group of investigators...

Neuroimaging studies of structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provide invaluable insights into the changes underlying neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, but frequently combine data collected from multiple scanners and experimental conditions. These conditions can yield data containing substantial technical variability and biases due to differences in sites, scanners, and image...

We are delighted to announce that Hader Mansour, MD, PhD (Assistant Professor of Psychiatry), has been selected by the University of Pittsburgh Department of Physician Assistant Studies Class of 2021 as Preceptor of the Year in Behavioral Health. Dr. Mansour is medical director of the Addiction Medicine Services inpatient unit at UPMC Western Psychiatric Hospital (WPH). For the past several years, he has supervised...

Severe worry is a complex transdiagnostic phenotype independently associated with increased morbidity, including cardiovascular diseases, cognitive impairment, and accelerated brain aging. A group of investigators, including Pitt Psychiatry scientists Andrew Gerlach, PhD (postdoctoral scholar); Helmet Karim, PhD (Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Bioengineering); Joseph Kazan, MD (postdoctoral scholar); Howard...