Keith H. Nuechterlein, Ph.D.

The Center is led by Keith H. Nuechterlein, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Director of the Aftercare Program, a research clinic for schizophrenic patients, UCLA Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior. Dr. Nuechterlein specializes in neurocognitive processes in schizophrenia, especially as they relate to both the developmental course of the disorder and to functional outcome. Dr. Nuechterlein’s ongoing longitudinal study of the early course of schizophrenia, “Developmental Processes in Schizophrenic Disorders”, has closely examined the influence of specific neurocognitive vulnerability indicators on the early course of first-episode patients, with an emphasis on occupational and educational outcome. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and the Department of Psychology (Clinical and Behavioral Neuroscience areas) at UCLA.

Carrie Bearden, Ph.D.

Dr. Bearden is Associate Professor in Residence of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and Psychology and the Assessment Director of the CAPPS research program. She earned her doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999. After completing a clinical internship at UC San Diego/VA Medical Center, she completed postdoctoral training in Pedatric Cognitive Neuroscience at the Penn/Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, before joining the UCLA faculty in 2003, where she was recently promoted to Associate Professor. Her research aims to understand genetic influences on brain structure in the development of psychosis, using converging methods to study cognition and neuroanatomy in clinical high-risk samples (adolescents at ultra high-risk for psychosis), and in possible ‘genetic subtypes’ of the disease with very high penetrance (i.e., 22q11.2 microdeletion syndrome). She has received 2 NARSAD Young Investigator Awards for her research using quantitative measures of thought disorder and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tasks of linguistic processing to predict outcome in adolescents at ultra-high risk for psychosis, and those with recent onset of psychosis. In addition, she is currently conducting an NIMH-funded project examining neural endophenotypes of bipolar disorder in a genetically isolated population in Latin America. For further information, please visit http://www.npi.ucla.edu/neurogenetics/members.php

Thomas R. Belin, Ph.D.

Thomas R. Belin, Ph.D., is a Professor in the UCLA Department of Biostatistics who since 1995 has had a joint appointment in the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences. Dr. Belin came to UCLA as a post- doctoral fellow after receiving his Ph.D. in Statistics from Harvard in 1991, where he was a student of Donald Rubin, and he has been on the UCLA faculty since 1993. Dr. Belin's research interests focus on incomplete-data problems and causal inference, and he has expertise in methodologies such as multiple imputation, propensity-score adjustment, hierarchical models, and mixture models. He was elected to be a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2004, and in 2005 he received the Gertrude M. Cox Award from the Washington (DC) Statistical Society recognizing "a statistician making significant contributions to statistical practice."
He has also received awards for his work in mental-health research, including the Schlosser-Lewis Award of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (for the best paper on ADHD in 1998 in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, with R. Bussing, et al.) and the Excellence in Mental Health Policy and Economics Research Award - 2005/2006 (from the International Center of Mental Health Policy and Economics for his 2005 paper with M. Edlund and L. Tang in the Journal of Mental Health Policy and Economics). Dr. Belin is currently an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association.
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John Brekke, Ph.D.

John Brekke, Ph.D. is a Frances G. Larson Professor of Social Work Research at the USC School of Social Work and Director of the Hamovitch Center for Science in the Human Services. Dr. Brekke is among the leaders in developing measures and measurement models for functional outcome in major psychiatric disorders. Since 1989, he has been the principal investigator on four longitudinal studies funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and one funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Dr. Brekke is currently principal investigator of two studies funded by the National Institute of Mental Health: "Biosocial Factors in Rehabilitation for Schizophrenia" and "Predicting Psychosocial Rehabilitation Service Outcomes." His current research examines biosocial factors relevant to improving functional outcomes for individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia who are living in the community and also focuses on developing methods for adapting and disseminating evidence-based practice methods into community service settings for severely and persistently mentally ill individuals.

Tyrone D. Cannon, Ph.D.

Tyrone D. Cannon is the Staglin Family Professor of Psychology, Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences, the Carol Spivak Scholar in Neuroscience, and the Director of the Staglin Music Festival Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at UCLA. Dr. Cannon earned his bachelor’s degree at Dartmouth College (1985) and his doctoral degree at the University of Southern California (1990). He spent a year in clinical training at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute (1990-1991), before taking his first academic appointment in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 1997. He joined the faculty at UCLA in 1999. Dr. Cannon’s research aims to discover the causes of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and to develop effective treatment and prevention strategies based on an understanding of the genetic and neural mechanisms that give rise to these disorders. His studies have focused on elucidating the genetic and non-genetic factors that influence susceptibility to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and delineating their effects on brain structure and functioning across development, with a particular emphasis on gestational (pre- and perinatal) and adolescent periods of brain development A hallmark of his work is the integration of molecular biological and neuroimaging approaches in unique populations such as twins discordant for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and selected members of large prospectively evaluated birth cohorts who have developed one of these conditions in adulthood. Recent work has incorporated transgenic animal models and has extended this translational human-animal genetics and neuroscience strategy to Neurofibromatosis 1, an inherited condition affecting brain structure and function. With support from the Music Festival for Mental Health and the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Cannon has established a clinical research center for early detection and prevention of major mental illness in at risk youth based in the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. In that project he and his colleagues are ascertaining individuals who are at risk for imminent onset of psychosis and following them in longitudinal neuroimaging studies aimed at identifying the neural changes that occur proximally to onset of psychosis. For further information, please call (310) 206-8765, email cannon@psych.ucla.edu, or visit http://www.schizophrenia.ucla.edu/prevention, cannonlab.psych.ucla.edu http://www.cannonlab.psych.ucla.edu, or http://www.capps.ucla.edu.

Alan Page Fiske, Ph.D.

Alan Page Fiske, Ph.D., is Professor in the Department of Anthropology, UCLA. He is a psychological anthropologist who worked in Africa for eight years. His primary research goal is to understand how human social relationships are shaped by the coordination of psychology, culture, ontogeny, evolution, neuroanatomy and neurochemistry. He is best known for his relational models theory and research showing that there are only four fundamental, universal forms of intrinsically motivated social coordination. He also leads a research team studying social motives and moral emotions in frontotemporal dementia, and has studied OCD and personality disorders. He is one of the founders and past directors of the UCLA Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture; and of the FPR-UCLA Center for Culture, Brain, and Development. For further information, please visit http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/fiske/.

Michael Foster Green, Ph.D.

Michael Foster Green, Ph.D. is a Professor-in-Residence in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and is Director of the Treatment Unit of the Department of Veteran Affairs VISN 22 Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center (MIRECC). Dr. Green obtained his B.A. in psychobiology at Oberlin College, his doctorate in neuropsychology at Cornell University, and his postdoctoral training in neuropsychology at UCLA. He is on the editorial boards of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, Schizophrenia Research, and Schizophrenia Bulletin and has authored over 130 journal articles. He has received numerous grants from NIMH, the Veterans Administration, and private foundations. His research activities have been devoted to understanding the nature and implications of cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia, including neurocognitive indicators of genetic vulnerability to schizophrenia and neural mechanisms of cognitive dysfunction. His laboratory has explored the relationship between cognitive deficits in schizophrenia and activities of daily living, and the neurocognitive effects of antipsychotic and adjunctive medications. He has written two books: Schizophrenia from a Neurocognitive Perspective: Probing the Impenetrable Darkness, published in 1998, and Schizophrenia Revealed: From Neurons to Social Interactions, published in 2001. Dr. Green is a past president of the Society for Research in Psychopathology. For further information, please visit http://greenlab.npih.ucla.edu/Overview.htm.

Gerhard Hellemann, Ph.D.

Gerhard Hellemann, Ph.D., SIStat Senior Statistician, received his doctorate in psychology from UCLA where he studied psychometrics under Dr. Peter Bentler. Dr. Hellemann has both theoretical and practical experience with mixed models, hierarchical data, structural equation modeling, factor analysis, and path modeling techniques, all of which are essential for this center’s research. He has worked closely with many of the project scientists both during his graduate studies and more recently as a SIStat consultant. He has played a key role in the center’s initial cross-project analyses.

William P. Horan, Ph.D.

William P. Horan, Ph.D., is an Associate Research Psychologist in the Department of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA. Dr. Horan completed his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of New Mexico, a clinical internship at the Western Psychiatric Institute & Clinic in Pittsburgh, PA, and a post-doctoral fellowship at UCLA. He investigates emotional, social cognitive, and neurocognitive processes in schizophrenia, and how disturbances in these areas impact functional outcome. Specific research interests include negative symptoms, translation of concepts and methods from basic affective and social cognitive neuroscience to studies of schizophrenia, and psychosocial treatments for people with severe mental illnesses. For further information, please visit http://greenlab.npih.ucla.edu/Overview.htm.

Sun Sook Hwang, M.S.

Sun Sook Hwang, M.S., Manager of SIStat, has supervisory responsibility for the routine data management and programming necessary to support the individual projects, and supervises the overall day to day activities of the unit. She has received her Master’s degree in Biostatistics in 1985 at UCLA and has been working at SIStat since then. She has more than 20 years of experience on statistical consulting and data management. She handles varied tasks that require knowledge of computer languages and creates data files for investigators, supervises file updating, cleaning and maintenance. She has published about 20 papers in Mental Health research.

Kimmy S. Kee, Ph.D.

Kimmy S. Kee, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Psychology at California State University, Channel Islands, and is also an Assistant Research Psychologist in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA. Dr. Kee earned her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Medical College of Pennsylvania and Hahnemann University in Philadelphia. Subsequently, she pursued her post-doctoral training in schizophrenia research at UCLA. Her research interests within schizophrenia include neurocognitive and social cognitive processes and psychosocial functioning. She has systematically explored the nature, determinants, and treatments for deficits in emotion processing through a series of projects funded through grants from the NIMH, Veterans Administration, Stanley Foundation, and Janssen Research Foundation. For further information, please visit http://greenlab.npih.ucla.edu/Overview.htm.

Barbara Knowlton, Ph.D.

Barbara Knowlton, PhD, is a Professor in the Behavioral Neuroscience area of the Department of Psychology. She is the basic cognitive neuroscience collaborator of Dr. Cannon for the project on “Encoding and Retrieval in Long-Term Memory”. The focus of Dr. Knowlton’s work is the study of the neural bases of memory. Her lab uses a number of different approaches in humans and animal models in order to describe functional differences between memory systems and the brain systems that support them. One area of particular interest is on the dissociation between episodic and non-episodic memory and the differential involvement of hippocampus in the former. Additional work evaluates the neural basis of executive function by testing neuropsychological patients.

Peter J. Lang, Ph.D.

Peter J. Lang, Ph.D. is a Graduate Research Professor in the Department of Clinical and Health Psychology at the University of Florida, Gainesville and the Director of the NIMH Center for the Study of Emotion and Attention. Dr. Lang is an internationally recognized authority on the study of emotion. He is the recipient of many honors and awards, most notably the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychophysiology from the Society for Psychophysiological Research and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association. For further information, please visit http://csea.phhp.ufl.edu/.

Gang Li, Ph.D.

Gang Li, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Biostatistics in the UCLA School of Public Health. Dr. Li, who was recently elected a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, is an internationally recognized expert in longitudinal modeling and survival analysis. He has worked on developing statistical methods for the analysis of clinical trials and epidemiologic studies in which the time to an event is a primary outcome, as well as nonparametric regression, model selection, nonparametric and semiparametric likelihood ratio based inference, two-sample problems, and bootstrapping for censored, truncated, and biased data. His collaborative work in mental health research involves developing and applying statistical methods to understand schizophrenia, developmental neuropyschiatric disorders, and neurophysiological phenomena such as prepulse inhibition of startle. He has also been involved in survey research on mate availability, marital attitudes and mental health. Dr. Li will consult directly with investigators and through Dr. Sugar concerning appropriate structural and longitudinal models for center data.

Jim Mintz, Ph.D.

Jim Mintz, Ph.D., is a Professor with joint appointments in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, UCLA School of Medicine, and the Department of Biostatistics, UCLA School of Public Health. Dr. Mintz received his graduate training as a student of Jacob Cohen at NYU during the 1960s. He is past President of the Society for Psychotherapy Research. He served as a Member of the Clinical Research Center & Program Projects and the Mental Health Services Research Review Committees at NIMH. Dr. Mintz has published more than 300 scientific papers in peer-reviewer journals on topics covering most areas of psychiatric science.

Harold Pashler, Ph.D.

Harold Pashler, Ph.D., a Professor of the University of California, San Diego Department of Psychology. Dr. Pashler received the 1999 Troland Prize from the National Academy of Sciences "for his many experimental breakthroughs in the study of spatial attention and executive control, and for his insightful analysis of human cognitive architecture". For further information, please visit http://laplab.ucsd.edu/.

Mark Sergi, Ph.D.

Mark Sergi, Ph.D. is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at California State University Northridge. Dr. Sergi earned his doctorate in clinical psychology at the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1998 and completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA in 2000. Dr. Sergi’s research concerns relations between neurocognition, social cognition, and functional status in persons with schizophrenia and related disorders. He has published many articles in journals such as the American Journal of Psychiatry, Schizophrenia Bulletin, and Schizophrenia Research. Dr. Sergi is a licensed clinical psychologist with a part-time clinical practice in Tarzana, CA.

Kuo-Chung Shih, M.A.

Kenneth Subotnik, Ph.D.

Kenneth Subotnik, Ph.D. is a Research Psychologist and Adjunct Professor of the Department of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences. He is the Associate Director of the Aftercare Research Program, and co-Director of the Chronic Schizophrenia Recruitment and Assessment Core. He received his Ph.D. from the UCLA Department of Psychology in 1990. His areas of special research interest include, the examination of psychometric vulnerability indicators in schizophrenia patients and their family members, with a focus on measures such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI); 2) the examination of formal thought disorder and its relationship to neurocognitive and neuroanatomical abnormalities; 3) the early course of “positive” and “negative” schizophrenia symptoms and their clinical correlates; and 4) the examination of psychological factors affecting medication adherence, such as insight and attitudes toward antipsychotic medication.

Catherine Sugar, Ph.D.

Catherine Sugar, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics and the Director of the Semel Institute Statistics Core (SIStat) in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. in statsitics from Stanford University in 1998. Dr. Sugar's methodological expertise is in clustering, classification, and functional data analysis with an emphasis on finding patterns in high-dimensional or longitudinal data. She has also been involved in numerous applied projects in the mental health arena, particularly in schizophrenia and depression. This work has focused on identifying patterns of symptoms or functioning in patient populations and exploring how those patterns evolve over time in response to treatments or other stimuli.

Shelley E. Taylor, Ph.D.

Shelley E. Taylor, Ph.D. is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a preeminent social scientist who studies social support, self-regulation, stress, coping and health psychology. Dr. Taylor’s numerous honors and awards include the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, the Outstanding Scientific Contribution Award in Health Psychology and election to the Institute of Medicine, National Academies of Science. Additional information about Dr. Taylor and her research lab is available at http://taylorlab.psych.ucla.edu/.

Theo G.M. van Erp, Ph.D.

Theo G.M. van Erp, Ph.D., has an academic appointment as an Assistant Researcher in the Clinical Neuroscience Laboratory in the Department of Psychology at UCLA. He earned his bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in neuropsychology at the University of Nijmegen (1996) and his doctoral degree at the University of Utrecht (2007) in the Netherlands. He spent a year (1995-1996) in clinical and research training in the Brain Behavior Center at the University of Pennsylvania, before taking a position with Dr. Tyrone D. Cannon in the Clinical Neuroscience (CNS) Laboratory at the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he became the lab manager. He moved with the CNS Laboratory to UCLA in 1999. Dr. Van Erp’s research interests focus on understanding the nature, sources (genetic / environmental), and pathogenesis (development) of the neural mechanisms underlying schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, through the use of behavioral, brain morphological (MRI), biochemical (MRS), and functional (fMRI) measures. His Ph.D. thesis focused on understanding the sources of hippocampal morphological abnormalities and the nature and the sources of episodic memory abnormalities in schizophrenia. Dr. Van Erp has numerous published works on neurobiological endophenotypes for schizophrenia. For further information, please call (310) 206-4902, email vanerp@psych.ucla.edu, or see http://vanerp.bol.ucla.edu, http://www.cannonlab.psych.ucla.edu/, or http://www.capps.ucla.edu.

Joseph Ventura, Ph.D.

Joseph Ventura, Ph.D., is a Senior Research Psychologist and member of the Faculty in the UCLA
Department of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences. Dr. Ventura and his colleagues have developed and published a set of internationally recognized diagnostic and symptom assessment training and quality assurance procedures. He is responsible for all training and quality assurance functions, development, standardization, and refinement of the Center's diagnostic and psychiatric symptom assessment procedures.

Cindy M. Yee-Bradbury, Ph.D.

Cindy M. Yee-Bradbury, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the UCLA Geffen School of Medicine. Dr. Yee-Bradbury received her doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and completed her clinical internship training at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. Her current research focuses on neurocognitive vulnerability to schizophrenia and on the relationship between stress and emotion to vulnerability to schizophrenia, emphasizing the interrelationships between physiological, psychological and social aspects of behavior. Dr. Yee-Bradbury directs the Laboratory on Clinical Affective Psychophysiology which relies upon dense array recordings of EEG activity along with measures of autonomic nervous system activity and neuroendocrine response to complement interview and behavioral measures of clinical symptoms, life stress and coping. For further information, please visit http://lcap.psych.ucla.edu/.