People

I have spent my entire academic career in a clinical department using brain imaging methods to ask clinical neuroscience questions about symptoms experienced by people with a variety of psychiatric conditions. My work has focused on neural activity and connectivity (1, 2) in clinical groups. Although my most recent work has focused on using fMRI methods to understand the neural basis of psychotic experience, I am well positioned to guide trainees in clinical neuroscience research.

I have more than 25 years of prior work in research, study design, statistical analysis, and data interpretation. I serve as Mentoring Facilitator for research faculty in my department and as an Assistant Director of the UCSF CTSI Mentor Development Program to give midcareer faculty knowledge and skills to succeed as mentors. My research concentrates on health disparities research, randomized disease prevention trials, applied statistical analyses, and related methodological issues, focusing mostly on clinic to community translational research (T2/T3) studies.

My laboratory studies neural mechanisms of perception, attention and memory, with an emphasis on the impact of distraction and multitasking on these abilities. Our research approach utilizes a powerful combination of human neurophysiological tools, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG) and transcranial electrical and magnetic stimulation (TMS, TES). A major focus of our research has been to expand our understanding of alterations in the aging brain that lead to cognitive decline.

In May 2013, I was recruited to UCSF to lead the University’s new PhD program in Epidemiology and Translational Science. My training and earlier career were spent at the Harvard School of Public Health, where I established myself as an exceptional mentor (winning the School’s mentorship award in 2012) and a leader in innovative quantitative methods to support causal inferences from observational data. My research focuses on healthy aging, and particularly time-varying lifecourse determinants of stroke and dementia (Alzheimer’s, vascular, and mixed etiologies) risk in late life.

I am a medical anthropologist who works in biomedical ethics with a focus on emerging genetic/genomic technologies. Throughout my career, I have pioneered bioethics research that uses empirical data to inform policy analysis and clinical practice. Previously, I directed two biomedical ethics centers (at Stanford University School of Medicine and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN).

I have extensive experience working with patients with mood disorders both clinically and in research studies that will be a key asset to the proposed effort, as well as nearly 30 years of experiencing treating patients with mood disorders. I also carried out fundamental work on the personalization of therapies for the treatment of patients with mood disorders and the development of novel therapies for these conditions (See C.2 below).

Alicia F. Lieberman, Ph.D. is Irving B. Harris Endowed Chair of Infant Mental Health, Professor and Vice Chair for Academic Affairs at the UCSF Department of Psychiatry, and Director of the Child Trauma Research Project, San Francisco General Hospital.  She directs the Early Trauma Treatment Network, a center of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network.

I am a psychiatrist and psychologist by training, with extensive experience with electroencephalographic and functional magnetic resonance imaging methods and their application to the study of neuropsychiatric disorders. My lab has focused on studies of schizophrenia, including the prodromal period preceding psychosis onset, and is aiming to identify and validate brain biomarkers that can serve as predictors of psychosis risk in clinical high risk patients.

I have wide-ranging experience in both the development of statistical methodology and the novel application of advanced statistical methods. My focus has been on methods for correlated data including longitudinal data models for normally or non-normally distributed outcomes, latent variable and latent class models. I have co- authored book length treatments of those topics (Variance Components, Wiley, 1992 with SR Searle and G Casella; Generalized, Linear, and Mixed Models, Wiley, now in its second edition in 2008 with JM Neuhaus and SR Searle).

PTSD neurobiology and treatment research, sleep-wake physiology, daytime fatigue and performance, neuroendocrinology, gene microarray, brain imaging, and Phase II & III clinical trials.

My research is focused on uncovering the mechanisms by which traumatic psychological stress increases risk for mental and physical health problems. I have more than ten years of training and experience in health psychology, with a particular emphasis on psychoneuroimmunology. As a Visiting Scholar from Ireland as both a pre- and post-doctoral trainee, I benefited greatly from the seminars available through the NIMH-funded “UCSF Psychology, Health and Medicine” program led by Drs. Nancy Adler and Margaret Kemeny.