Description

Dr. Melhem will present her work on the course of grief reactions in parentally bereaved youth, the impact of the pandemic on adolescents and adults’ psychiatric symptoms and grief reactions, and her work on the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis as a potential mechanism implicated in prolonged grief in youth.

About the Presenter

Dr. Melhem’s background is in psychiatric and genetic epidemiology. She received her PhD from the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research program is focused on the neurobiology of stress response and suicidal behavior in youth and includes mechanistic and translational studies to understand the biological mechanisms implicated in depression, prolonged grief, and suicidal behavior and to identify biomarkers for these phenotypes that could translate into clinical practice and inform prevention and intervention efforts. She has expertise in the conduct of longitudinal studies in at risk-youth and children and families exposed to major stressors such as parental death, parental cancer, and parental divorce. Her work has characterized the phenomenology of grief reactions in youth and contributed to the empirical evidence supporting the inclusion of prolonged grief disorder diagnosis in DSM-5R. She is the Principal Investigator of four NIMH R01 studies, the recipient of a Young Investigator Award from AFSP, and twice the recipient of a Young Investigator Award from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, and a NIMH Career Development Award.