Faculty Member
Professor & Associate Director, UCLA Anxiety and Depression Research Center
Department of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences
David Geffen School of Medicine
University of California, Los Angeles
Biography
Dr. Kate Wolitzky-Taylor is an Associate Director of the Anxiety and Depression Research Center (ADRC). Her primary appointment is as a Professor in the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences. Dr. Wolitzky-Taylor obtained her B.A. summa cum laude in psychology from Emory University, where she completed her undergraduate research assistantship in the Trauma and Anxiety Recovery Program. She received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, obtaining clinical and research training in the Laboratory for the Study of Anxiety Disorders. Dr. Wolitzky-Taylor received a predoctoral National Research Service Award (NRSA, NIMH-funded F31) in order to examine self-administered behavioral treatments for pathological worry. Dr. Wolitzky-Taylor completed her predoctoral internship at the Medical University of South Carolina in the Traumatic Stress Track, where she was on an NIMH-funded trauma-related training grant (T32). She completed a 3-year postdoctoral research fellowship at UCLA in the ADRC (2009-2012) where she was the Project Director of the Youth Emotion Project, an NIMH-funded R01 examining common and specific risk factors for anxiety and depression. Dr. Wolitzky-Taylor completed a Career Development Award in Patient-Oriented Research (K23; funded by NIDA), the focus of which was to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of a brief CBT program to be delivered in community substance use disorder (SUD) specialty care clinics for individuals with comorbid anxiety disorders and SUDs. She has been the Principal Investigator for several NIH-funded studies that focus on the development and evaluation of treatments for comorbid emotional disorders and substance use disorders. She is the Director of Clinical Services for the Depression Grand Challenge Innovative Treatment Network, is a PI (along with Dr. Craske) for the UCLA STAND NIMH ALACRITY Center (P50), and she treats patients with anxiety and related disorders in the UCLA Faculty Practice Outpatient Clinic and in the Behavioral Health Services, where she also directs a CBT rotation for psychiatry residents. She has extensive experience in training and supervising clinical psychology doctoral students and psychiatry residents in delivering CBT and in research methods. Dr. Wolitzky-Taylor provides clinical supervision, statistical consultation, and research mentorship to the ADRC’s doctoral students and research staff. Her research interests include investigating mechanisms of change during behavioral treatment for anxiety disorders, increasing access to CBT for anxiety disorders in community settings, and understanding and treating comorbid anxiety and SUDs.
Faculty Member
Della Martin Professor
Department of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences
Department of Psychology
University of California, Los Angeles
Biography
Dr. Asarnow is the director of the UCLA Pediatric Traumatic Brain Injury Research Program. He is the Della Martin Professor of Psychiatry in the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and also a Professor in the UCLA Department of Psychology. He is a neuropsychologist with extensive experience in the neuropsychological evaluation of children and adolescents with TBI and in the use of brain imaging and electrophysiology in clinical research. Dr. Asarnow and his students and colleagues have conducted one of the major studies of the cognitive and psychological outcomes following mild traumatic brain injury in children and one of the largest controlled studies of cognitive training in children with brain injuries. By enhancing our understanding of the likely range of outcomes after a child incurs a mild traumatic brain injury these studies have provided information that help parents develop plans to maximize the recovery of their children. He is the principal investigator of two studies of pediatric traumatic brain injuries funded by the National Institute of Health that are currently being conducted in the laboratory. In addition to his research Dr. Asarnow also sees patients with traumatic brain injuries and their families clinically.
Faculty Member
Assistant Professor
Department of Physiology
David Geffen School of Medicine
University of California, Los Angeles
Department of Physiology
Center for Health Sciences, 53-320
630 Charles E Young Dr S,
Los Angeles, CA 90095
Biography
Chuchu Zhang, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physiology in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She received her B.S. in Biochemistry from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She then received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of California, San Francisco, where she worked with Dr. David Julius studying pain-producing toxins from venomous animals. Her work utilized these natural toxins to identify and manipulate pain-related signal transduction machineries in sensory neurons. Afterwards, she carried out her postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Stephen Liberles at Harvard Medical School, where she started her independent trajectory to study nausea. She focused on a brain structure, the area postrema, which mediates nausea responses to several visceral threats. Her work has uncovered fundamental aspects of the area postrema, including cell types, receptors, and nausea-related neural circuits. The Zhang Lab opens in September 2023 at UCLA.