Rachel Yehuda, PhD. is Professor and Vice Chair for Veterans Affairs in the Psychiatry Department at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai where she is also the Director of the Trauma
tic Stress Studies Division. She was recently inducted into the National Academy of Medicine based on the recognition of a lifetime in the field of the biology of PTSD. In this Q & A, Dr Yehuda sheds some light on her research and some of the trends as well as challenges within the field.
Who have been your greatest professional inspirations?
My heroes are people who are not just smart but also brave: From scientists who have challenged the status quo to advance new ideas to combat veterans who put their lives on the line for a greater good.
The kind of people who inspire me are those who advance and defend ideas that are not popular, but are nonetheless true. My mentors at Yale, Drs. John Mason and Earl Giller emphasized that creating good science involves the ability to see something that had not been seen before. This can often be disruptive to a field, and accordingly, there may be resistance to new ideas. That’s where the bravery comes in, because new findings often need to be defended. My mentors also taught me the importance of working with a team who can provide feedback, critique, and enhancements to an idea or finding.
The people who had to fight for PTSD to be recognized as a diagnosable condition were deeply heroic. When I first started in this field, people had to be convinced that PTSD is an actual biological disorder, and there have been many surprises along the way in terms of our understanding of this highly complex disorder.
What is your primary professional project at this time, and what are your intended outcomes of achieving it?
My lab continues to be interested in developing even more robust biomarkers. Our initial work in the field was like most initial efforts—exciting in its novelty—but the science continues to unfold. There may be even better ways to gather this information, where these markers better mimic gene bio environmental interactions. We’re also keenly interested in exploring better treatments for PTSD.
What do you see as the greatest challenge in your career and field? What obstacles or barriers are limiting progress?
We are limited because the tissue of most interest to us is the brain, and so we do a lot of simulations in blood hoping that the information will be informative to the brain. We consistently have to make guesses about how the brain is working because we don’t have access to the living brain of PTSD patients to examine from the molecular neurobiological level. The ability to have confidence in what is observed from blood samples requires a lot of innovative work in animal and cell models behind the scenes.
As a leading researcher in PTSD, what hopes do you have for Polaris’s goals of advancing behavioral health? What hurdles do you anticipate before reaching these?
Take the technology and develop a portable test that can be used in the field and within hospitals to help in diagnosis of PTSD. Historically, we have been crippled by not having an objective biological diagnosis and this test represents a first very real step in that direction.
What do you hope will be the next big breakthrough in our field?
That we can use the information from our biological studies to create a cure for PTSD.
If you could, what would you tell someone who is interested in going into this field right now?
Science is a calling. Someone interested in science usually cannot imagine being anything else but a scientist. But the most important thing to know is that there is still so much we need to learn, so you can make a difference!
Thank you for these insights and inspiration, Dr Yehuda.