Dr. Yousha Mirza, WSU assistant professor of psychiatry & behavioral neurosciences, recently had a research article accepted for publication in the Journal of Child Neurology. Before his promotion, Dr. Mirza, a graduate of the WSU General and Child Psychiatry Residency Training Programs, served as a post-doctoral fellow in the lab of David Rosenberg, M.D., WSU Hamburger Endowed Chair of Child Psychiatry, professor and chief of child psychiatry and psychology and director of the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Clinical Research Program. In his paper, Dr. Mirza identified a neuroimaging biomarker that differentiates pediatric patients with obsessive compulsive disorder from both healthy children and pediatric patients with major depression. With this type of brain scanning, children with OCD can be distinguished from children with depression and children without psychiatric disorders. This alteration may be reversible with effective treatment.

In addition, Dr. Rosenberg reports that Frank McMaster, a post-doctoral research fellow working in his lab, recently received a New Clinical Drug Evaluation Unit New Investigator Award from the National Institute of Mental Health.