Brain Development Related Content

Just How Does Drinking Affect the Teenage Brain?

Studies at McLean Hospital and elsewhere have shown that alcohol affects the brains of adolescents in profound and dangerous ways. During the teenage and early adult years, the brain is still developing, making it more vulnerable to alcohol than the adult brain. Moreover, research indicates that the...

Blood Vessel Development’s Role in Psychiatric Disorders

For decades, scientists have known that gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) is a key factor in the development of neuropsychiatric disorders. But recent discoveries in the Angiogenesis and Brain Development Laboratory of Anju Vasudevan, PhD, have literally opened a new pathway. Disruptions in prenatal...

The Essence of Adolescence: Examining Addiction in the Teenage Brain

When Marisa M. Silveri, PhD , director of McLean Hospital’s Neurodevelopmental Laboratory on Addictions and Mental Health, gives community presentations on the effects of alcohol and drug use on the adolescent brain, she refers to herself as a “neuroscience interpreter.” Speaking to hundreds of...

Staff Profile: Martin Teicher, MD, PhD

Martin Teicher, MD, PhD, has been director of the Developmental Biopsychiatry Research Program at McLean Hospital since 1988. He was chief of the former Developmental Psychopharmacology Laboratory (now the Laboratory of Developmental Neuropharmacology) and is currently an associate professor of...

Staff Profile: Staci Gruber, PhD

Staci Gruber, PhD, is the director of the Cognitive and Clinical Neuroimaging Core and the Marijuana Investigations for Neuroscientific Discovery (MIND) program at McLean Hospital. She is an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Her research focuses on the application of...

Staff Profile: Jennifer T. Sneider, PhD

Jennifer T. Sneider, PhD, focuses her research on the role of the hippocampus, with a particular interest in characterizing sex differences and the role of the menstrual cycle on hippocampal-based memory function. She has received funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to apply magnetic...

Staff Profile: Julia E. Cohen-Gilbert, PhD

Julia E. Cohen-Gilbert, PhD, employs cognitive and behavioral measures in conjunction with magnetic resonance imaging and magnetic resonance spectroscopy to investigate the role of brain development in cognitive and emotional regulation during adolescence. She is particularly interested in dynamic...

Staff Profile: Marisa M. Silveri, PhD

Marisa M. Silveri, PhD, has been studying the neurobiology of brain development and consequences of alcohol and drug abuse using preclinical and clinical models for over two decades. Her current work uses non-invasive magnetic resonance techniques to examine brain structure, function, and...

Staff Profile: Fredric Schiffer, MD

Fredric Schiffer, MD, is a research associate at McLean and an assistant professor of psychiatry, part-time, at Harvard Medical School. He has been studying the relationship between past traumas, cerebral laterality, and depression and anxiety, and has developed a hypothesis on the physical nature...

Staff Profile: Gabriele Chelini, PhD

Gabriele Chelini, PhD, started his career in neuroscience joining a PhD program at the University of Florence, where he acquired expertise in working with in vitro and in vivo electrophysiology in mouse models of neurodevelopmental disorders. During this training, he spent 8 months with the Hensch...

Staff Profile: Oluwarotimi Folorunso, PhD

Oluwarotimi Folorunso, PhD, is a post-doctoral research fellow in the Division of Basic Neuroscience Research. His research focuses on investigating the cellular and molecular mechanism that underlie cognitive deficits in psychiatric and neurological disorders such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s...