Research Assistant Professor Doreen Olvet, PhD received a Researcher Travel Award from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) to participate in the World Congress on Suicide in Montreal June 10-13, 2013. Dr. Olvet, who received her doctorate in Biopsychology from Stony Brook University in 2009, is an AFSP Post-Doctoral Research Fellow. She is investigating the relationship between deficits in white matter integrity and suicidal behavior using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), a form of diffusion-weighted MRI.
Findings from a recent study which she and colleagues conducted at Stony Brook University found that people who had attempted suicide had significantly lower measures of fractional anisotropy, an indicator of deficits in white matter connections, in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex than those who had not attempted suicide. The travel grant will enable her to present her findings in a paper titled “Evidence of white matter deficits in suicide attempters with major depressive disorder.” The world congress is hosted by the International Academy of Suicide Research.
