Scott J. Moeller PhD

Scott Moeller is currently an Associate Professor and Vice Chair for Clinical Research in the Department of Psychiatry at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University. His graduate training was in Experimental Social Psychology at the University of Michigan, where he studied conscious and unconscious determinants of behavioral and emotional self-control, with applications to substance abuse. He then received an F32 Postdoctoral Fellowship from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to pursue full-time training in the methods of clinical neuroimaging, first at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and finishing at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

While at Mount Sinai, he received a K01 Award from NIDA and was promoted to Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience. He then accepted a tenure-track position at Stony Brook University, where he established NIDA-funded programs of research in opioid use disorder and tobacco use disorder. With over a decade of experience in the field, he has led many studies and projects that have examined addiction-related impairments spanning multiple executive and emotional functions, including an investigation into the mechanisms of craving and drug-seeking behavior.

Many of these manuscripts have incorporated fMRI, EEG, or other imaging modalities, and more recently he has received funding to conduct PET research. Much of his recent work aims to understand the neurocircuitry underlying impaired insight in opioid use disorder. In a similar vein to other psychiatric disorders (e.g., schizophrenia), insight into addiction is anticipated to increase addiction severity and reduce treatment engagement and prognosis.