The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) awarded Brian Sweis, MD, PhD, a five-year $4.2 million research project (R01) grant. Dr. Sweis is an incoming Assistant Professor in Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Called the Biobehavioral Research Award for Innovative New Scientists (BRAINS award), the prize funds exceptional early career researchers who propose bold, high-risk, high-reward ideas that could potentially significantly advance behavioral neuroscience research and have a far-reaching impact in the field of mental health. This award marks the first time in Mount Sinai’s history that a psychiatry resident successfully competed for an R01.

This award will support Dr. Sweis’s research into how the brain makes complex decisions by applying principles in cross-species neuroeconomics. The Sweis Lab will focus on uncovering the evolutionary origins and neurobiological properties that underlie the psychological processes driving our economic choices. This project will investigate mechanisms of counterfactual thinking–the ability to represent hypothetical outcomes of unselected actions– which is central to a wide range of complex cognitive functions. It will look at the computational basis of regret, a poorly understood decision-making process contributing to nearly all psychiatric illnesses. In collaboration with other researchers at Mount Sinai, including Denise Cai, PhD, this project will leverage advanced circuit dissection tools to characterize the biological mechanisms governing how neurons integrate information across networks to support counterfactual thinking. Translating behavioral neuroscience discoveries from animal models to humans is inherently challenging, but the Sweis Lab is well positioned to close the knowledge gap in the psychological framework guiding experiments across species, which has the potential to accelerate treatment discoveries for psychiatric disorders.

Dr. Sweis will step into a leadership role as Director of Neuroeconomics within the Centers for Affective Neuroscience and Computational Psychiatry and will serve as an Assistant Training Director for Research in the Psychiatry Residency Program to help accelerate the path toward independence for physician-scientists.