University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine Promotes Akiko Mizuno, PhD, to Research Assistant Professor of Psychiatry

We are pleased to announce that Akiko Mizuno, PhD, has been promoted to Research Assistant Professor of Psychiatry by the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. 

Dr. Mizuno earned her PhD in cognitive psychology from Carnegie Mellon University. She joined the University of Pittsburgh as a postdoctoral scholar in the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)-funded Clinical and Translational Research Training in Geriatric Mental Health T32 program, and completed additional postdoctoral training on the functional neuroanatomy correlates of worry in older adults. She joined the Pitt Psychiatry faculty in 2021.

Dr. Mizuno’s research is aimed at identifying mental processes and neural mechanisms underlying cognitive decline. She led a coordinated set of preliminary computational analyses in which she conceived and implemented an advanced large language model framework to extract latent psychosocial and generativity-related features from intergenerational dialogue data. In parallel, using data from a well-characterized longitudinal cohort, Dr. Mizuno led the application of transformer-based models to characterize and project trajectories of cognitive functioning over time. This work served as the foundation for her recently awarded Brain and Behavior Research Foundation Young Investigator Grant. 

In addition to serving as principal investigator (PI) of a Young Investigator grant, Dr. Mizuno is co-investigator (co-I) on a National Institute on Aging (NIA) R37 focused on gray matter brain aging and small vessel disease in Alzheimer’s disease pathology (MPI: Howard Aizenstein, MD, PhD; Tharick Pascoal, MD, PhD). She is additionally co-I on an NIA R01 focused on sleep in those at risk for Alzheimer’s disease (PI: Kristine Wickens, PhD).

Dr. Mizuno has authored peer-reviewed articles in influential journals, including a recent high-impact review in Neuropsychopharmacology that addresses current debates on how emerging artificial intelligence technologies can be responsibly leveraged to enhance mental health research from a geriatric psychiatry perspective.

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Mizuno!