Neural mechanisms of risk for problem-level cannabis use among emerging adults

Dr. Lichenstein is a licensed clinical psychologist, an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, and Assistant Director of the Yale Imaging and Psychopharmacology Lab at Yale School of Medicine. She received her BA in Psychology from Bard College (2008), and her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Pittsburgh and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC) in 2018. She completed her clinical internship in Yale’s Doctoral Internship in Clinical & Community Psychology with a dual focus on substance use disorder prevention and treatment, followed by postdoctoral training in the Neuroimaging Sciences T32 Training Program at Yale, applying advanced neuroimaging analysis and predictive modeling methods to elucidate neural mechanisms of addiction pathophysiology. Since joining the faculty at Yale School of Medicine, Dr. Lichenstein’s research has focused on investigating how patterns of neural network connectivity impact the course of cannabis and other substance use disorders. To this end, she is currently completing the fifth year of a mentored K08 award combining multiple, large-scale, neuroimaging datasets with novel densely-sampled fMRI data to identify a neuromarker of problem-level cannabis use, and to characterize its development prior to cannabis use onset, and in the context of current cannabis use during adolescence and emerging adulthood.