Engaging in active inquiry, scholarship, consultation, and training in the science of mental health and illness to add to the fund of knowledge on which both theory and practice are based.
Research in Psychiatry
The Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences has continued to attract high-profile researchers with NIH and multi-national collaborative grants including ADHD expert Stephen Faraone and Empire Scholars Chunyu Liu and Christopher Gaiteri. Research interests range from groundbreaking findings by Ma-li Wong and Julio Licinio linking schizophrenia to gut microbiomes, to research by Jonathan Hess that develops innovative computational and neuro-genomics toolkits for complex brain disorders.
The Department is further fueled by Stephen Glatt's research on genetic risk and resilience factors for a wide variety of disorders, including schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease, Usha Satish’s worldwide use of man-machine simulation methodologies to assess and train human factors and productivity across many fields and, Paula Trief’s international reputation for her work with persons with type 1 and type 2 diabetes.
Cutting edge methods including molecular cellular neurobiology, electrophysiology, circuit mapping and manipulations, animal behavior, human iPS cells, bioinformatics, and machine learning are being employed to facilitate exciting findings in psychiatric research. Through their NIH-funded and non-federal grants, as well as their collaborations with existing faculty, the Department has soared from little funding to over $80,000,000 in cumulative grant funding since 2000. But more significant than research dollars are the department's long-range contributions to the field of psychiatric neuroscience.
As the community's need for mental health services grows, so does the need for psychiatric research. In response, psychiatry research continues to grow exponentially at SUNY Upstate: Our clinical researchers are also making research gains in the fields of psychiatric genetics, psychopharmacology, suicide prevention, addiction treatment, veteran mental health and work culture.
Through research, we create new knowledge, and aim to develop more-targeted, more-efficient, and more-effective treatments world-wide for psychiatric disorders and mental illness.