Harinder Rai, 24, has just less than two years left of medical school, but already he is garnering national recognition for his efforts in child and adolescent psychiatry research.
His most recent accolade is the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Life Members' Mentorship Grant for Medical Students, which provides a total of 14 students an introduction to child and adolescent psychiatry, networking opportunities with distinguished psychiatrists and up to $1,000 for travel expenses to attend the AACAP's annual meeting, set for Oct. 22-27, 2013, in Orlando, Fla.
"This meeting brings together some of the best clinicians, researchers and mental health advocates from across the country. I'm thankful that an organization and meeting of such high caliber would award me this grant," Rai said. "I'm particularly excited to receive this grant because AACAP is an organization that represents much of what excites me about the field of child and adolescent psychiatry. It is an organization that is nonprofit and aims to promote not just great clinical practices and research but also advocacy for the mentally ill in social and political life."
Rai was born in Punjab, India, and immigrated to Michigan at age 2. He is a Detroit resident and third-year medical student expected to graduate in 2015. He began working in the Wayne State University School of Medicine's Division of Brain Research and Imaging Neuroscience in 2011, the summer before his first year of medical school. This is his second major national award in 2013. He won a competitive trainee travel award to attend the annual Wisconsin Symposium on Emotion in April.
Rai studies under Vaibhav Diwadkar, Ph.D., associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences and co-director of the BRAIN lab.
His research involves functional magnetic resonance imaging projects, which look at brain network interactions in children and adolescents. He will present the study, "Disordered brain network salience for faces during emotional memory and appraisal in children at risk for schizophrenia: Neural bases in the pre- morbid adolescent state," during a poster session at the AACAP meeting. His poster presentation will explore the stress-diathesis model, one of the dominant theories for the emergence of mental illness.
"This essentially posits that certain individuals may be genetically less resilient to social and emotional stressors in their life. This may reflect vulnerability of their brain network's ability to function properly, and thus cause certain individuals to (become susceptible to) symptoms such as flattened affect or mania," Rai said. "This is why in the BRAIN lab we chose to study the adolescent children of schizophrenia patients, as this is a group well established to be at higher risk for a whole host of illness from bipolar to depression. During this key juncture of development we wanted to look at how their brains may be dysfunctioning when processing emotions, so we had them do a task that required them to appraise the emotions displayed by various faces and to remember those emotions as well."
The study is the first of its kind to look at network differences in at-risk adolescents involving both emotional appraisal and memory, and provides a very early glimpse into how network dynamics may differ in those at higher risk for mental illness, he added.
"The award, I think, reflects the AACAP's implicit understanding of the value of this approach as represented in Harinder's work and also their perception of his promise as a researcher of the future," Dr. Diwadkar said. "This approach toward understanding mechanisms of dysfunction is precisely what is now being touted by the National Institute of Mental Health as the path forward."
NIMH Director Thomas Insel, Ph.D., announced in April that the institute's Research Domain Criteria will be the new standard by which the NIMH will assess funding proposals. He wrote that it launched the RDoC project to transform diagnosis by incorporating genetics, imaging, cognitive science and other levels of information to lay the foundation for a new classification system. The approach assumes, among other things, that mental disorders are biological disorders involving brain circuits that implicate specific domains of cognition, emotion or behavior, and that mapping the cognitive, circuit and genetic aspects of mental disorders will yield new and better targets for treatment.
Rai didn't always plan for a medical career in child and adolescent psychiatry. While the field certainly interested him before medical school, his work in the BRAIN lab grew that interest into something more.
"I'm thankful to have found a field that has genuinely captured my passion and curiosity," he said.
"I really want to thank Dr. Diwadkar for being an amazing mentor throughout my medical school experience," he added. "I'd also like to thank all the faculty and administration at the School of Medicine. The medical school has provided me many opportunities to distinguish myself, from the summer research fellowship to the annual competitive research symposium, which have allowed me to convey to the selection committee how invested I am in the future of child and adolescent psychiatry."