Rajita Sinha, PhD

Dr. Rajita Sinha, is the Foundations Fund Endowed Professor in Psychiatry, Neuroscience and Child Study at the Yale University School of Medicine. She is also the Chief of the Psychology Section in Psychiatry and Co-Director of Education for the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation. Her PhD was in Biological Psychology and she then retrained in Clinical Psychology and is a licensed Clinical Psychologist with expertise in mood, trauma, anxiety and addictive disorders. She is the founding director of the Yale Interdisciplinary Stress Center that focuses on understanding the sex-specific neurobiology of stress, trauma and resilient versus vulnerable coping mechanisms that promote neuropsychiatric diseases such as alcoholism, other substance abuse, PTSD and other chronic diseases. Her lab also develops and tests novel treatments to address these processes to prevent relapse and risk of stress-related chronic diseases. Her research has been supported by a series of NIH funded research projects continuously for over 20 years and she has published over 250 scientific peer reviewed publications in these areas. She currently serves on the NIH/NIAAA Advisory Council and also on the Expert Scientific Panel for the NIH Common Fund’s Science of Behavior Change program. She has served on many other NIH special emphasis panels, review committees and workshops, presented at numerous national and international conferences, and her work is widely cited. She has been featured as an expert on stress and trauma and its effects on memory, cognition, emotion and health behaviors for numerous news outlets including the Dr. OZ Show, NBC Nightly News, CNN Health, Wall Street Journal and USA Today to name a few. She also conducts workshops, lectures and retreats on stress management, self-care for the stressed professional and for senior executives, and on ways to reduce stress to enrich and enhance work, family and life.