- Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Yale School of Medicine, Yale University
Dr. Christopher Pittenger is the Mears & Jameson Professor and Deputy Chair for Translational Research in the Department of Psychiatry, and Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology, and in the Child Study Center at Yale University. He also serves as Director of the Yale Center for Brain and Mind Health, the Clinical Neuroscience Research Unit, and the Neuroscience Research Training Program. He earned his MD and PhD from Columbia University – where his PhD was completed under Nobel Prize laureate Eric Kandel – and completed his residency in adult psychiatry at Yale.
Dr. Pittenger’s basic, translational, and clinical research seeks to deepen understanding of the pathophysiological processes underlying obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), Tourette syndrome, and related conditions. His work on pediatric acute-onset neuropsychiatric disorder (PANS) and pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorder associated with Streptococcus (PANDAS) has identified autoantibodies that bind to a specific population of interneurons in the basal ganglia — providing, for the first time, a neurally specific model for the pathophysiology of these enigmatic and sometimes controversial conditions. Funded by the Colton Consortium and the National Institutes of Health, this work holds promise for the development of novel diagnostics and therapeutics.
Dr. Pittenger is a Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, a member of the Connecticut Association for Science and Engineering and the American Society for Clinical Investigation, and Chair of the Grant Review Committee of the International OCD Foundation.