David Morilak, Ph.D. obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton University, then did his post-doctoral training at Flinders Medical Centre in South Australia and at Stanford. He joined the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Texas Health San Antonio in 1994, and is now Professor of Pharmacology, Director of the Neuroscience Graduate Program, and Director of the Center for Biomedical Neuroscience at UTHSA. Dr. Morilak’s research is on the etiology, pathology, and treatment of stress-related psychiatric disorders including major depression, PTSD and other anxiety disorders.  His lab uses rats to study brain mechanisms underlying the adaptive response to stress, chronic stress pathology, and novel treatments, including pharmacological, cognitive-behavioral, and device-based therapies.  They have pioneered the investigation of extinction learning as a rat model of prolonged exposure therapy, and as a platform to test new approaches for adjunct treatment to enhance the efficacy of exposure therapy. More broadly, his lab studies mechanisms of cognitive impairment and its treatment in conditions ranging from depression, PTSD and schizophrenia, to hormone therapy and chemotherapy for cancer.