Faculty

Jennifer Bartz, PhD, Adjunct Assistant Professor is a psychologist, interested in social cognition, attachment, and prosocial behavior. She has approached her research using tools from social psychology and, more recently, from social neuroscience. In particular, she has been interested in oxytocin, a neuropeptide implicated in social bonding, and its role in social motivation and prosocial/approach behavior, the processing of social stimuli, and the formation of social memories. In addition to studying these processes in healthy individuals, she has been interested in applying the knowledge gained from preclinical work in this area to better understand and, possibly, inform treatments for disorders marked by deficits in social functioning including autism. In addition to this line of research, Dr. Bartz is interested in understanding the relationship between complex social cognitive abilities assessed in the laboratory and real world social functioning in autism spectrum conditions. Dr. Bartz is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at McGill University.

Jin Fan, PhD, Assistant Professor, is the director of the Laboratory of Neuroimaging, which serves as a core cognitive neuroimaging laboratory for the Department of Psychiatry at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Fan also holds an appointment in the Department of Neuroscience. His research is in the areas of cognitive neuroscience and functional neuroimaging of normal and disease states.

Arthur Goldberg, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry in the Seaver Autism Center and holds a joint appointment in the Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology. Dr. Goldberg’s research at the Center focuses on design and development of computational infrastructure for processing large genomic data sets, including tools for visualization, statistical and pathway analysis. In particular, Dr. Goldberg leads the creation of the software infrastructure for the Autism Sequencing Consortium. He is responsible for funding, staffing and managing a team of computer scientists and computational biologists, including local and remote members, to work on this project. Dr. Goldberg also participates in several aspects of analyzing ASD data, including copy number variations in the DNA of people with ASD, genomic pathways which will integrate our understanding of the genetic changes associated with ASD and epigenetic changes which may also contribute to ASD.

Michelle Gorenstein-Holtzman, PsyD, is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai and Director of Community Outreach for the Seaver Autism Center. Dr. Gorenstein-Holtzman graduated from Washington University and earned her doctorate in clinical psychology from Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology. Dr. Gorenstein-Holtzman is interested in bringing evidenced based social skills programming for children and adolescents on the autism spectrum to community centers. Dr. Gorenstein-Holtzman is also interested in adapting Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for individuals on the autism spectrum.

David Grodberg, MD, Assistant Professor, trained at the Yale Child Study Center, where he developed expertise in developmental psychopathology in autism and other developmental disorders. In formulating a child's psychiatric diagnosis, he considers the longstanding effects of neurobiology on development as well as the day-to-day difficulties children experience in their social, communicative, and emotional functioning. Dr. Grodberg also serves as the school psychiatrist for the Association for Metroarea Autistic Children. He participates as an investigator on several clinical studies at the Seaver Autism Center and was awarded an NIH National Research Service Award grant. Dr. Grodberg is conducting his own research in imaging in autism as well.

Ozlem B. Gunal, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry in the Seaver Autism Center. She received her MD and PhD from Hacettepe University in Turkey. She worked as a postdoctoral fellow in Peter H. Reinhart's laboratory at Duke University and Dr. George W. Huntley's laboratory at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her overall research goal is to understand the mechanisms of synaptic plasticity and remodeling in the nervous system and the role of these processes in neurodegenerative disorders. She uses electrophysiological techniques for recording of neural activity in vivo, in brain slice preparations in vitro, and from dissociated neuronal cultures, as well as collaborative methods including biochemical, molecular biological, and imaging techniques.

Danielle Halpern, PsyD, Assistant Clinical Professor, is a clinical and school psychologist who completed her doctoral training at Yeshiva University and postdoctoral fellowship at the Seaver Autism Center. Dr. Halpern serves as Director of Psychology Graduate Training, supervising graduate externs and interns from local training programs, coordinating with four local graduate training programs in developing the only diagnostic evaluation and intervention training program for psychology trainees in New York City. In addition, Dr. Halpern conducts evaluations as part of our clinical and research programs and is a co-investigator on social skills research studies at the Seaver Autism Center.

Alexander Kolevzon, MD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics, has published numerous papers on autism as well as three books designed for medical student and resident education. He has extensive clinical expertise in the psychopharmacology of autism and related conditions and his research is focused on developing new pharmacological treatments as an investigator on many clinical trials. He is also extremely committed to medical student and residency training and education and is the Associate Residency Training Director in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Mount Sinai. He is an active teacher, mentor, and clinical supervisor and has received many teaching awards, as well as a grant to support innovative educational endeavors. Dr. Kolevzon serves as the Director for the Autism Clinical Program.

Dalila Pinto, PhD, is a Seaver Faculty Fellow and an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Genetics and Genomic Sciences. She conducts research in the Seaver Autism Center, the Child Health and Development Institute, the Friedman Brain Institute and the Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology. She earned her MSc from the University of Porto and PhD from the University of Utrecht, and did her postdoctoral fellowship in the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Dr. Pinto's research focuses on understanding how the human genome varies in sequence, structure and copy number, and how this genetic variation contributes to phenotype differences and disease risk in families and populations, with an emphasis on autism and other neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders. By using a combination of high-throughput technologies together with bioinformatics and statistical genetics, her research aims to integrate structural variations and other forms of genetic variation with gene expression, epigenetics and clinical data, to identify biological pathways involved in neurodevelopmental disorders including autism, intellectual disability and epilepsy.

Christopher Poultney, PhD, is a Research Scientist in the Seaver Autism Center. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from New York University. His thesis and post-doctoral work focused on computational biology applied to protein structure prediction and regulatory network inference. Dr. Poultney's research at the Seaver Center has two facets: developing and implementing pipelines for data storage and analysis of large genomic data sets; and carrying out analyses of genomic data from patients with ASD, particularly detecting copy number variations and discovering perturbations of regulatory networks.

Anne Schaefer, MD, PhD, is a Seaver Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at the Friedman Brain Institute at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She joined Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai to start her own laboratory in 2011 after finishing her postdoctoral studies in Dr. Paul Greengard’s Laboratory at The Rockefeller University. Her research is focused on understanding how epigenetic mechanisms – miRNAs and posttranslational histone modifications – contribute to the maintenance of specialized neuronal functions and their alteration during psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases. Her laboratory is particularly interested in understanding the epigenetic mechanisms of cellular plasticity and its role in regulation of microglia-neuron communication. One of the major focuses of her research lies in the development of animal models of human psychiatric disease associated with abnormal function of epigenetic regulators of different types. Using pioneering technologies including cell type specific analysis of mRNAs, miRNAs and chromatin modifications in neurons in vivo, her research aims at understanding the mechanism of neurological disorders and at their potential treatment by targeting the neuronal epigenome.

Jeremy Silverman, PhD, Professor, is a psychologist educated at Oberlin College (B.A.) and New York University (Ph.D.), with a strong interest in the genetic epidemiology of psychiatric disorders. His work is primarily oriented toward the identification and refinement of phenotypes for genetically complex psychiatric disorders, in particular, autism, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer's disease. Such phenotypes are then available to serve molecular genetic studies seeking to identify vulnerability genes for these disorders. In autism, he is beginning to study candidate biological endophenotypes, such as oxytocin, and neuropsychological endophenotypes, especially pertaining to executive function tasks associated with "switching" and the transfer of implicitly learned material to related but novel situations in affected and unaffected family members as well as controls.

Latha Soorya, PhD, BCBA, Adjunct Assistant Professor, is a clinical psychologist whose research interests include the use of behavioral and neuropsychological assessments to understand the variability in treatment response commonly observed in individuals with autism spectrum conditions. In collaboration with Dr. Ting Wang, Dr. Soorya is conducting a randomized clinical trial of social skills approaches with verbally fluent children with autism and related conditions. evaluating both behavioral and neural effects of treatment. Dr. Soorya is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Rush University Medical Center.

Ting Wang, PhD, Assistant Professor, is a developmental psychologist with expertise in neuroimaging. Her research uses functional MRI to examine the neural substrates of social competence in typical development and such impairment in autism. Most recently, Dr. Wang's work integrates neuroimaging with various treatment approaches (psychosocial and pharmacological) in order to 1) identify predictors and correlates of response to treatment and 2) examine the plasticity of the neural systems associated with core symptom domains in autism.