Zhiru Jia, PhD, a research psychologist with expertise in neurobiology,
joined the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral
Science in February as a Research Assistant Professor of Psychiatry.
Dr.
Jia will work with Drs. Roman Kotov and Evelyn Bromet as a member of
the Psychiatric Epidemiology Division performing data analyses, writing
manuscripts and grants, and helping the group incorporate neuroimaging
into its protocols. She will be a member of the Suffolk County Mental
Health Project team and assist with the study of health and mental
health problems among 9/11 responders, which the Department conducts in
collaboration with the World Trade Center Health Program.
Dr. Jia
spent the past two years working as a NIMH T32 Fellow in Geriatric
Depression with George Alexopoulos, MD at the Weill Cornell Institute of
Geriatric Psychiatry where she performed functional MRI studies
investigating reward processing dysfunction in people with late-life
depression. Before that, she spent two years as a postdoctoral associate
at Yale University School of Medicine using fMRI to study stress and
addiction, gender differences in the reward circuitry of substance
abusers, and correlation of reward processing with treatment outcome in
cocaine dependence. She earned her doctoral degree in Biopsychology at
Stony Brook University, where Nancy Squires, PhD was her advisor and
mentor on ERP studies of cognitive processes of the human brain. Dr.
Jia has published neuroimaging articles in journals such as Biological Psychiatry, Human Brain Mapping and Journal of Neuroscience and has extensive experience in image data acquisition, pre-processing and analysis, and statistical analysis.
Roman
Kotov PhD, who recruited Dr. Jia to her new position at Stony Brook,
said that she “will bring valuable knowledge of neuroscience methods to
our program as we continue to strengthen our translational neuroscience
research. Her technical expertise and understanding of neurobiology will
enable us to investigate critical questions in this field. We are
pleased to have her as part of our group.”
