Jay Nierenberg, MD, PhD

My research focuses on the use of neuroimaging techniques (mainly MRI) to better understand brain structure and function in substance use disorders, Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders.  My lab’s principal focus is to better understand how the brain recovers in patients in treatment for cocaine use disorder in a way that reduces the propensity to relapse.  We use MRI methods that examine the connections between brain regions (white matter integrity) as well as the size of brain regions, and we study these in relation to specific brain functions measured with neuropsychological testing.  The work has been supported by funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.  In particular, our goal is to understand whether brain measures predict treatment success or dropout and which brain abnormalities are related to relapse.  These goals are expected to inform how to improve treatment or tailor it to individuals with severe and/or multiple addictions.  Our lab also studies whether MRI can be used in the early detection of Alzheimer’s disease by evaluating cognitively healthy elderly adults with the major genetic risk factor for the most common form of Alzheimer’s disease. Lastly, my lab has collaborated on studies of schizophrenia for many years. Mostly recently, my work has examined the neural correlates of social reward learning in schizophrenia. Techniques of interest in my laboratory are diffusion tensor imaging, volumetric MRI, resting state MRI for characterizing function connectivity  and functional (task-related) MRI.