Rachel Yehuda, PhD
Rachel Yehuda joined the Psychiatry Department in 1991, and has been a tenured professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS) for over 20 years with a demonstrated record of successful and productive research projects. She received her Ph.D. at the University ofMassachusetts at Amherst, MA and completed post-doctoral work at Yale Medical School. Dr. Yehuda is the Mental Health Patient Care Center Director and Director of the Laboratory of Clinical Neuroendocrinology and Neurochemistry at the James J. Peters VAMC, and has recently been appointed as Vice Chair for the Veterans Affairs in the Psychiatry Department. Her expertise is in the study the enduring effects of trauma exposure, particularly PTSD, as well as associations between biological and psychological measures. Throughout her career she has been interested in the role of hormones and other molecular and brain processes in producing vulnerability and resilience to trauma exposure. She has received numerous grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the Department of Defense, the Veterans Administration and various Foundations such as Lightfighter Trust, The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation. These grants have allowed the Yehuda lab to innovate in areas of molecular biology and treatment of PTSD, identification of risk and resilience, an intergenerational transmission of trauma effects. Dr. Yehuda’s laboratory has produced more than 400 peer-reviewed publications from previous projects as well as over 10 edited volumes. Her work has been featured in several documentaries and lay media.