The Gut-Brain Axis and Psychosis

Dr. Dolores Malaspina is Professor of Psychiatry and Pharmacology in the Mount Sinai Medical Schools Institute for translational medicine.

She trained in psychiatry and launched her career at Columbia University and New York State Psychiatric Institute, becoming the director of Clinical Neurobiology and launching the “Schizophrenia Research Unit” (SRU) and high-risk program with Cheryl Corcoran (COPE) before becoming chairman of Psychiatry at New York University and the Bellevue Hospital Center. She founded and directed the multidisciplinary “Institute for Social and Psychiatric Initiatives” (InSPIRES) to study the heterogeneous underpinnings of psychosis and train beginning investigators before joining Mount Sinai as the Director of Psychosis Research and treatment.

Her education in environmental biology (Boston U), zoology (Rutgers U) and epidemiology ( Columbia U), along with medical, psychiatry and research training established the framework for her research approach which spans persons, populations, animal models.

She has made novel contributions to psychiatry. She first proposed and demonstrated large effects of advancing paternal age on the risk for schizophrenia, now recognized as the source of rare gene variants in genetic architecture.

Her work on the gut-brain-axis and hippocampal inflammation was the first NIMH grant funded for microbiome research in mental illness and will be discussed.

In addition her group is examining the underpinnings of late onset schizophrenia and worsening depression in menopausal women in another NIMH grant to Julie Spicer, her prior mentee. She has had continuous NIMH funding for 35 years, published 500 papers and received awards for research, clinical care and mentoring.