Biography
Catherine M. Cahill, Ph.D. trained as an opioid neuropharmaoclogist at Dalhousie University, Canada receiving her PhD in 1996. She was recruited to the Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Care at University of California Irvine in 2012 from Queen’s University in Canada where she held a Canada Research Chair in Chronic Pain for 10 years. She moved to UCLA in 2017 and is now a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences and a member of the Hatos Center for Neuropharmacology at the University of California Los Angeles.
She has more than 25 years experience in research that focuses on understanding mechanisms of chronic pain and opioid analgesia, tolerance, dependence and addiction. Her research spans both basic science and human research, which focuses on how chronic pain states modulate reward circuitry and changes dopaminergic transmission responsible for motivated behavior. A large emphasis of her research focuses on understanding the processes that influence the positive and negative reinforcement and changes in mesolimbic circuitry in order to identify novel treatment strategies for opioid dependence and chronic pain.
Dr. Cahill’s research is supported by the National Institutes of Drug abuse, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, the National Institute of Aging, the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, the Department of Defense and the Shirley and Stefan Hatos Foundation.
Biography
Dr. Shulamite Green is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA’s Semel Institute. Dr. Green received a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at UCLA in 2014. Thereafter, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center with a focus on pediatric neuroimaging. Dr. Green is currently the director of the Sensory, Cognitive, and Affective Neurodevelopment (SCAN) lab. Dr. Green’s research integrates multiple neuroimaging techniques with behavioral and psychophysiological methodology to determine the biological mechanisms underlying clinical symptoms in a way that can be directly translated to creating interventions and improving quality of life. Much of Dr. Green’s current research is focused on the neurobiological bases of sensory over-responsivity, a common and impairing condition in which individuals over-react to sensory stimuli in their environments, causing challenges with participation in school, work, family life, and the community. Dr. Green conducted some of the first fMRI work demonstrating brain differences in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) specifically related to sensory over-responsivity, as well as identifying potential brain mechanisms through which some children with ASD regulate their sensory responses. She has continued to build on this work to identify how certain brain areas contribute to or regulate these difficulties and interfere with or facilitate attention and social functioning.
Dr. Green also has a strong interest in the impact of parenting and early caregiving adversity on development, with much of her early work focused on how parenting can confer resilience for children with developmental disabilities. Her current NIH-funded K08 career development award is focused on examining how common and distinct neural, behavioral, and clinical correlates of sensory over-responsivity in children adopted from foster care compared to those with autism.
In addition to the K08 award, Dr. Green’s work has been funded by multiple NIH grants, including a recent R01 from NIMH to study the development of sensory regulation across childhood and adolescence, and has been published in prominent scientific journals including JAMA Psychiatry , the American Journal of Psychiatry , the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, and Translational Psychiatry . Dr. Green is also the recipient of a dissertation award from the International Society for Autism Research as well as a Brain and Behavioral Research Institute Young Investigator Award.
Dr. Green is passionate about mentoring as well as promoting justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) in her lab, the department, and academia in general. She co-leads the teaching and mentoring JEDI group for the Center for Autism Research and Treatment (CART), and holds monthly JEDI meetings in her lab.
Clinically, Dr. Green serves as the autism specialist for UCLA TIES for Families, a program that provides extensive inter-disciplinary services for families adopting children from foster care. Dr. Green conducts autism evaluations and consultations for therapists working with families in this program.
View a up-to-date publication list: NCBI
