UT Dallas doctoral student Sam DeWitt, M.S., is the recipient of a postdoctoral fellowship at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, a medical school consistently ranked in the top 20 for research productivity nationwide. His work will focus on reward processing from a neuroimaging perspective in adolescents with mood and anxiety disorders.
“We are very excited for Sam to join us in the Pediatric Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai,” said Vilma Gabbay, M.D., Chief of the Pediatric Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program and Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “His expertise in fMRI and his experience with research on reward functioning in adolescent populations make him extremely well-suited to contribute to our projects that examine reward circuitry dysfunction in youth. We were extremely impressed by Sam when he came to interview at Mount Sinai and know that he will be an excellent addition to our team!”
DeWitt is scheduled to receive his Ph.D. in cognition and neuroscience this spring before heading to Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York in August. He is currently a research assistant in the Cognitive Neuroscience Research of Addictive Behaviors lab at the Center for BrainHealth under the direction of Francesca Filbey, Ph.D. where he added seven publications to his credit, serving as lead author on two of them.
“I am very excited about this opportunity. It is a perfect continuation of my current dissertation research that focuses on the neural underpinnings of reward processing in healthy adolescents,” said DeWitt. “I always envisioned that the next step would be turning my attention towards such processes in clinical adolescent populations.”
DeWitt holds a master’s degree in Applied Cognition and Neuroscience from UT Dallas and completed his undergraduate degree in psychology with a minor in neuroscience at The Ohio State University. He studied translational neuroscience at the Mind Research Network at the University of New Mexico for two years before joining the Center for BrainHealth.
“This is a high honor for Sam and his advisor, Dr. Francesca Filbey,” said Bruce Jones, Ph.D., the director of research and operations at Center for BrainHealth. “The UT Dallas neuroscience program is growing in reputation, and Sinai is a really prestigious placement.”
