Hugh Garavan PhD

Dr. Hugh Garavan is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Vermont. He received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience from Bowling Green State University in Ohio and completed postdoctoral fellowships at Cornell University and the Medical College of Wisconsin. He was an Associate Professor in the School of Psychology at Trinity College Dublin prior to his move to Vermont in 2011.

Dr. Garavan’s research uses structural and functional neuroimaging to study cognitive control and reward processes with a particular interest in how functional changes in these systems may contribute to addiction and related mental health issues. In addition to studying current polysubstance users, he has researched the importance of cognitive control systems for maintaining drug abstinence. His primary research focus of the last few years has been adolescent neurodevelopment including risk factors for psychopathology and drug use. He is a co-investigator on the IMAGEN project, a longitudinal neuroimaging-genetic study of over 2,000 teens in Europe. He is a site PI and Associate Director of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, a longitudinal neuroimaging-genetic study of over 11,000 children in the USA. He is PI on a T32 that trains pre- and postdoctoral fellows in the application of complex systems methodologies to large neuroimaging datasets and is co-founder of the ENIGMA-Addiction working group which is a data pooling endeavor that combines neuroimaging data from thousands of substance users from around the world.