Amit Etkin

Biography

Amit Etkin, MD, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and an Investigator in the VA Sierra-Pacific Mental Illness Research Education and Clinical Center (MIRECC) at the Palo Alto VA. Dr. Etkin received his MD/PhD at Columbia University with Nobel laureate Eric Kandel, completed his psychiatry residency and concurrent postdoc at Stanford University with Alan Schatzberg, and joined the faculty at Stanford in 2009. He has been awarded the BRAINS (Biobehavioral Research Award for Innovative New Scientists) R01 Award from the National Institute of Mental Health and a Dana Neuroscience Scholar Award from the Dana Foundation, and is an Associate Editor at Neuropsychopharmacology. The overarching aim of the Etkin lab is to understand the neural basis of emotional disorders and their treatment, and to leverage this knowledge to develop novel treatment interventions. In so doing, we hope to establish a new intellectual, scientific and clinical paradigm for understanding and manipulating human brain circuits in healthy individuals and for treating psychiatric disease. The lab’s work is organized around the neuroscientific study of emotion, cognition and their regulation in healthy subjects and individuals with psychiatric disorders. Ongoing work includes basic neuroscience of emotional and cognitive neurocircuitry, cross-sectional neuroimaging of a range of psychiatric disorders (anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder), investigation of the neural mechanisms of psychotherapeutic, pharmacological and brain stimulation treatments for these disorders, and trials of neuroscience-based brain training interventions developed in the lab. Additional work using concurrent transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) with fMRI is used to understand how activity in one brain region causally translates into activation in interconnected regions and networks, and how communication within defined neural circuits can be more specifically manipulated by repetitive TMS stimulation.

Research Interest

The overarching aim of the Etkin lab is to understand the neural basis of emotional disorders and their treatment, and to leverage this knowledge to develop novel treatment interventions. Our work is organized around the study of the neuroscience of emotion and cognitive regulation, as well as neural circuit function, in healthy subjects and individuals with a range of psychiatric disorders. Emotion regulation: A successful affective neuroscience approach to psychopathology and treatment requires understanding the basic mechanisms involved in emotion regulation. Although our initial work thus far has yielded important insights, we are far from a thorough understanding of how emotion is regulated. Ongoing work in the lab is focused on understanding the factors which govern emotion regulation, the relationship between implicit (i.e. nonconscious) and explicit (i.e. conscious) regulation, and whether there are ways to improve implicit emotion regulation through training.