The Center for Psychiatric Neuroscience focuses on research into the pathophysiology and treatment of the major mental disorders, and is internationally recognized as one of the leading centers for schizophrenia research. Its grant portfolio includes two federally-funded Center grants, each totaling more than $1 million dollars each year, as well as numerous individual project and career-development grants from the National Institutes of Health as well as private foundations. Center investigators routinely publish in each of the top 5 journals in psychiatry, and have published in other high-impact journals including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Journal of Human Genetics, Human Molecular Genetics, and Neuroimage.  In recent years, Center investigators have published the first genomewide association study (GWAS) in the field of psychiatry, two important studies documenting clinical and cognitive response to initial treatment in schizophrenia, and a major study suggesting that treatment with antidepressants may play a role in preventing the onset of schizophrenia in at-risk adolescents.

The Center is comprised of two major Programs: the Program for Translational Research and the Program for Intervention and Services Research. The Program for Translational Research focuses on utilizing the modern tools of neuroscience to understand the pathophysiology of the major mental illnesses and to address the considerable heterogeneity of response to the psychotropic drugs used to treat them. Primary research modalities include molecular genetics, neuroimaging and cognitive neuropsychology.  The Program for Intervention and Services Research aims to enhance the treatment and outcome of patients with major mental illnesses, conducting clinical trials, outcome studies and novel research focused on the earliest stages of illness development and course. Together, the two programs provide an integrated approach to the understanding of these devastating and disabling brain disorders.

An important part of the mission of the Center is the pursuit of local, national, and international partnerships and collaborations.  Center Director John M. Kane, MD, is President of the Schizophrenia International Research Society (SIRS), and other senior investigators are founders or co-founders of international meetings and consortia in their subfields. Center co-Director, Anil K. Malhotra, MD is founder of the Pharmacogenetics in Psychiatry annual meeting, now in its eighth year, as well as a member of the international psychiatric GWAS consortium, which is pooling data from tens of thousands of psychiatric patients examined at institutions around the world to identify extremely subtle genetic causes of illness. Barbara A. Cornblatt, PhD, is co-founder of the North American Prodromal Longitudinal Study, which links 6 major centers in the United States and Canada in an effort to identify predictors of schizophrenia in teenagers.

The Center offers two post-doctoral Research Fellowship Programs, emphasizing clinical, molecular and biological approaches to the heterogeneity of psychiatric disorders. One program is for psychiatrists who have recently completed their residency or those residents entering their last year of training (R-4). The other program is for recent recipients of doctoral degrees in Psychology, Neuropsychology or Neuroscience. Both programs provide advanced training in research in schizophrenia, affective disorders and related disorders. Instruction in research methodology is provided through courses and supervision. Opportunities are available to work in the following specialized disciplines: clinical phenomenology including diagnosis and assessment, clinical psychopharmacology, neuropsychology, neuroimaging, [(positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)], and molecular genetics.

Fellows and residents are encouraged to develop independent research initiatives.

PROGRAM FOR TRANSLATIONAL RESEARCH
The Program for Translational Research (Program Head: Anil K. Malhotra, M.D.) has two major goals: 1) to identify the biological factors that influence risk for major psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and 2) to understand the relationship between biological risk factors and clinical manifestations of these disorders that critically impact outcome of schizophrenia such as treatment response, symptom severity and neurocognitive and neuroimaging parameters.  The group has published papers reporting association of the genes DTNBP1 (dysbindin) with schizophrenia, neurocognitive function, and negative symptoms; DISC1 (Disrupted in Schizophrenia - 1) with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, as well as neurocognitive function and positive symptoms of illness; COMT (catechol-o-metyhltransferase) with a range of psychiatric disorders and neurocognitive function; BDNF (Brain-derived neurotrophic factor) with schizoaffective disorder and brain morphology, DRD2 (dopamine receptor type 2) with treatment response in first episode schizophrenia; as well as completed the first whole genome association study in schizophrenia. This extensive work requires a multidisciplinary approach involving clinical researchers, neuropsychologists, brain imaging researchers, molecular geneticists and analytical genomics investigators. To that end, the Program has active collaborations with investigators within the Feinstein Institute as well as multiple external collaborations with institutions such as Harvard Partners, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the National Institutes of Health. An ongoing collaboration with the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory brings additional cutting-edge genomic approaches, including copy number variation and next-generation sequencing, to the study of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and a collaboration with the Harvard Partners Center for Genetics and Genomics served a similar role. Collaborations with leading neuroscientists at UCLA have generated several key publication using advanced morphometric algorithms to identify abnormalities of brain size and shape in patients with schizophrenia, and collaboration with basic biologists at Johns Hopkins University yielded novel findings about gene-gene interactions in schizophrenia.

PROGRAM FOR INTERVENTION AND SERVICES RESEARCH
The Program for Intervention and Services Research (Program Head: John M. Kane, M.D.) aims to enhance the treatment and outcome of patients with major mental illnesses. A major focus is the study of patients with schizophrenia, covering all phases of the illness from the putative prodromal phase, through the first episode, to chronic patients who are refractory to clozapine. The Program is based at the Zucker Hillside Hospital, an ideal setting for clinical psychiatric investigations because of its large and varied patient population and its extensive array of clinical programs. A majority of our patients are local residents, which facilitates engaging family members in providing background data as well as in participating in other aspects of research. The treatment setting provides high quality clinical care for both inpatients and outpatients. As the lead psychiatric facility of the North Shore Long Island Jewish Health System (NS-LIJ), investigators at The Zucker Hillside Hospital can also collaborate with other institutions in the network to extend these patient resources.

Study designs include long-term naturalistic outcome designs, controlled pharmacological treatment trials and intensive cross-sectional biologic assessment protocols. A recently initiated large-scale project assesses long-term multi-dimensional treatment strategies in patients experiencing their first episode of schizophrenia; and is the centerpiece of a large-scale NIMH-funded project entitled Recovery after an Initial Episode of Schizophrenia (RAISE). Another important area of study is severe mental illness in adolescence – represented by studies of adolescent bipolar disorder and refractory childhood schizophrenia, as well as comprehensive assessment and treatment studies of the adverse effects associated with drug treatment in younger patients. Investigators within the Program publish their results in leading international and national journals including the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Archives of General Psychiatry, and the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. Moreover, much of the Program’s work involves collaborations with leading clinical investigators throughout the world, and collaborative institutions include Johns Hopkins University, UCLA, Medical College of Georgia, University of Iowa, and Harvard University.

Administrative Staff:

PROGRAM FOR TRANSLATIONAL RESEARCH

Laboratory of Molecular Psychiatry – Anil Malhotra, MD

Laboratory of Analytic Genomes – Todd Lencz, PhD

Psychiatry Neuroimaging Laboratory  – Philip Szeszko, MD

Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience – Katherine Burdick, PhD, Terry Goldberg, PhD

PROGRAM FOR INTERVENTION AND SERVICES RESEARCH

Laboratory of Clinical Pharmacology – John Kane, MD

Laboratory of First Episode Psychosis - Delbert Robinson, MD

Laboratory of Child and Adolescent Intervention - Christoph Correll, MD, Vivian Kafantaris, MD

Laboratory of Treatment Adherence Research -- Delbert Robinson, MD, John Kane, MD

Laboratory of Somatic Treatments --  Georgios Petrides, MD

Recognition and Prevention Program -- Barbara Cornblatt, PhD

Laboratory of Autism Research -- Joel Bregman, MD