Our mission
The overarching mission of our lab is to have a deep impact on the intersecting fields of clinical, affective, and personality neuroscience. To that end, we strive to perform innovative studies that can lead to significant discoveries, to disseminate our discoveries as widely as possible, and to mentor trainees to become top-notch scientists.
Most of our work—both empirical and theoretical—is focused on understanding the nature and biological bases of anxiety-related states, traits, and disorders. When extreme, anxiety contributes to a variety of debilitating, often treatment-resistant mental illnesses, including internalizing disorders, substance misuse, and psychosis. To understand the origins and course of this liability, my group uses a broad spectrum of tools—including multimodal neuroimaging (MRI, PET), psychophysiology, smartphone digital phenotyping, semi-structured clinical and life-stress interviews, and genetic analyses—in pediatric and adult patients, university students, community members, and monkeys, working closely with collaborators in the U.S., Germany, China, and South Korea. More recently established secondary lines of research are focused on psychiatric nosology and graduate-student health and wellbeing.
Clinically, our work promises to enhance our understanding of how emotional states and traits contribute to a range of psychiatric disorders, facilitate the discovery of novel intermediate phenotypes and biomarkers, and set the stage for developing more effective transdiagnostic interventions. From a basic psychological science perspective, our work begins to address fundamental questions about the nature and the origins of temperament and the interplay of emotion and cognition—questions that often cannot be addressed using traditional behavioral or psychometric measures.
Our work has been continuously supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 2016.
July 2026—Dr. Shackman is reviewing graduate student applications for the APA/PCSAS-accredited Clinical Psychology and NACS (Neuroscience) doctoral programs . We are particularly interested in candidates with a strong interest in fear and anxiety, smartphone digital phenotyping of typical and atypical emotion, and functional MRI. Although ‘fear-and-anxiety’ is a core theme of our research program, specific NIH-sponsored projects are focused on testing the relevance of fear, anxiety, and their underlying neurocomputational substrates to schizophrenia and psychotic disorders (with Jack Blanchard), risky drinking and AUD (with John Curtin), as well as mood and anxiety disorders (with Drew Fox).
In preparing your Personal Statement, it is imperative that you address why you are interested in training with our group. Be as specific as possible and ground your thesis in our published and on-going research.
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