Rachel Yehuda

Rachel Yehuda is the director of the Center for Psychedelic Psychotherapy and Trauma Research at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her interests include PTSD treatment innovation, PTSD prevention, the study of risk and resilience factors, psychological and biological predictors of treatment response in PTSD, genetic and epigenetic studies of PTSD, and the intergenerational transmission of trauma and PTSD. She has an active federally-funded clinical and research program that welcomes local and international students and clinicians.

CV

Dr. Yehuda received her PhD in Psychology and Neurochemistry and her MS in Biological Psychology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and completed her postdoctoral training in Biological Psychiatry in the Psychiatry Department at Yale Medical School.

Her research on cortisol and brain function has revolutionized the understanding and treatment of PTSD worldwide and has been awarded the renowned Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry (Munich, Germany) 2004 Guest Professorship.

In 2019, Dr. Yehuda was elected to the National Academy of Medicine for her seminal contributions to understanding the psychological and biological impact of traumatic stress.

Rachel Yehuda, Ph.D. is now a Professor and Vice-Chair of Psychiatry and a Professor of Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She is also the Mental Health Patient Care Center Director at the Bronx Veterans Affairs, which includes the PTSD clinical research program and the Neurochemistry and Neuroendocrinology laboratory at Mount Sinai and the James J. Peters Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

Dr. Yehuda is a recognized leader in the field of traumatic stress studies. She has authored more than 450 published papers, chapters, and books in the field of traumatic stress and the neurobiology of PTSD.

Notable Research Papers

• MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for posttraumatic stress disorder: A promising novel approach to treatment (Vermetten & Yehuda, 2020)
• Should MDMA and Psilocybin be Used for the Treatment of PTSD? (Vermetten & Yehuda, 2019)
• Translating molecular and neuroendocrine findings in posttraumatic stress disorder and resilience to novel therapies (Yehuda, et al., 2019)

Find more on Google Scholar or PubMed

Media

She has given public talks:

• Psychedelic-assisted Psychotherapy for PTSD (Friedman Brain Institute Cyber series, 2020)
• A Survey of the Healing Potential of Psychedelics (Aspen Brain Institute, 2020)
• We Need to Talk (UNM Department of Psychiatry, 2015)

More media:

• Mount Sinai launches psychedelics research center (Eureka Alert, 2021)
• High Country: The Aspen Brain Institute examines the promising future of psychedelic-assisted therapy (The Aspen Times, 2020)
• Do Jews Carry Trauma in Our Genes? A Conversation With Rachel Yehuda (Tablet Magazine, 2014)