Rajita Sinha PhD

Rajita Sinha, Ph.D. is the Foundations Fund Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University and also Professor of Neurobiology and Child Study. She is Chief of the Psychology section in Psychiatry and Co-Director of Education at the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation, home of the NIH-supported Yale Clinical Translational Science Award. She is the Founding Director of the Yale Stress Center, a university-wide center that focuses on understanding the stress mechanisms affecting health behaviors, mood and emotion regulation, and chronic disease risk.

She is internationally known for her pioneering research on the mechanisms underlying chronic stress and adversity to negative health consequences and those underlying resilient coping that promote health and disease prevention. Her research has made discoveries in identifying childhood trauma, chronic stress, and addiction-related brain and peripheral changes in stress pathways that affect behavioral choices and decision making and loss of control to increase addiction and chronic disease risk. She is also developing and testing new pharmacological and behavioral strategies to reverse the toxic effects of stress and addictive behaviors such as excessive alcohol use, overeating of high fat and high sugar foods, and other behavioral addictions. These objectives are being accomplished through a series of NIH-funded research projects and she has published widely on these topics. She has served on many NIH special emphasis panels, review committees, and workshops, presented at numerous national and international conferences, and her work is widely cited.