The Carney Institute for Brain Science at Brown University is seeking Postdoctoral Fellows to join the NIMH funded T32 Training Program in Computational Psychiatry. The program’s goal is to train research fellows with expertise in computational cognitive and systems neuroscience, capable of collaborating with clinical researchers to advance knowledge of psychiatric disorders and treatments. Eligible research topics include brain and cognitive modeling over multiple scales and levels of analysis (ranging from biophysics to artificial intelligence), and the use of these models to understand mechanisms of psychiatric disorders with the ultimate goal of improving treatments. The program applies an apprenticeship model in which fellows work with a primary research trainer in a computational field and a secondary research mentor in clinical psychiatry. In this apprenticeship model, the trainer works closely with the fellow and a secondary clinical psychiatry mentor, who is conducting research in areas such as neuroimaging, neurostimulation, digital phenotyping, and/or animal models. The list of eligible faculty trainers can be found on the Training Program in Computational Psychiatry’s website.

Much of our daily behavior is driven by rewards. The ability to learn to pursue rewarding experiences is, in fact, an essential metric of mental health. Conversely, reduced capacity to engage in adaptive goal-oriented behavior is the hallmark of apathy, and present in the psychotic disorder. The search for its underlying mechanisms has resulted in findings of profound impairments in learning from rewards and the associated blunted activation in key reward areas of the brain of patients with psychosis. An emerging research field has been relying on digital phenotyping tools and ecological momentary assessments (EMA) that map patients’ current mood, behavior and context in the flow of their daily lives. Using these tools, we have started to see a different picture of apathy, one that is exquisitely driven by the environment. For one, reward sensitivity appears to be blunted by stressors, and exposure to undue chronic stress in the daily life may result in apathy in those predisposed to psychosis. Secondly, even patients with psychosis who exhibit clinically elevated levels of apathy are perfectly capable of seeking out and enjoying social interactions in their daily life, if their environment allows them to do so. The use of digital phenotyping tools in combination with neuroimaging of apathy not only allows us to add meanings to the neurobiological findings, but could also help design rational interventions.