Carrie Bearden, Ph.D.

Dr. Bearden is Associate Professor in Residence of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and Psychology and the Assessment Director of the CAPPS research program. She earned her doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999. After completing a clinical internship at UC San Diego/VA Medical Center, she completed postdoctoral training in Pedatric Cognitive Neuroscience at the Penn/Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, before joining the UCLA faculty in 2003, where she was recently promoted to Associate Professor. Her research aims to understand genetic influences on brain structure in the development of psychosis, using converging methods to study cognition and neuroanatomy in clinical high-risk samples (adolescents at ultra high-risk for psychosis), and in possible ‘genetic subtypes’ of the disease with very high penetrance (i.e., 22q11.2 microdeletion syndrome). She has received 2 NARSAD Young Investigator Awards for her research using quantitative measures of thought disorder and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tasks of linguistic processing to predict outcome in adolescents at ultra-high risk for psychosis, and those with recent onset of psychosis. In addition, she is currently conducting an NIMH-funded project examining neural endophenotypes of bipolar disorder in a genetically isolated population in Latin America. For further information, please visit http://www.npi.ucla.edu/neurogenetics/members.php

Dr. Carrie Bearden received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and joined the UCLA faculty as Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA in 2003. She hold a secondary appointment in the Department of Psychology. She has received numerous awards and honors, including Young Investigator Awards from the International Congress for Schizophrenia Research and the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Affective Disorders (NARSAD), and the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP), the A.E. Bennett Neuropsychiatric Research Award for Clinical Science in Biological Psychiatry, and the Samuel Gershon Junior Investigator Award from the International Society for Bipolar Disorders. Dr. Bearden's research aims to understand genetic influences on brain structure in the development of psychosis, using converging methods to study cognition and neuroanatomy in clinical high-risk samples (e.g., adolescents at clinical high-risk for psychosis), and in possible 'genetic subtypes of the disease with very high penetrance (e.g, 22q11.2 microdeletions). Another active research project, conducted in collaboration with Dr. Nelson Freimer, is an NIMH-funded study of neural endophenotypes of bipolar disorder in a genetically isolated population in Latin America.