Dr. David Baranger

Dr. Baranger is a Postdoctoral Scholar with Dr. Erika Forbes, at the University of Pittsburgh. He studies how risk factors for psychopathology - particularly early life stress and genetic risk - influence brain development. His work has so far focused on brain structure and reward processing, with an emphasis on better understanding the neurobiology of substance use and depression. He completed his PhD in Neuroscience at Washington University in St Louis, where he worked with Dr. Ryan Bogdan and Dr. Deanna Barch. His dissertation was on the use of neural biomarkers (i.e. reward reactivity and brain structure) to disentangle the causes and downstream consequences of alcohol use. In his postdoc he has been studying how early life trauma and environmental stress influence adolescent development of reward processing, and its relationship to depression.