Dr. Aaron Alexander-Bloch

Predicting Treatment Response in Young People with Psychosis

Dr. Aaron Alexander-Bloch’s path to science and psychiatry began as an undergraduate philosophy major. While taking the premed curriculum at Harvard College, his senior thesis explored the “Mind Body Problem” – how human feelings emerge from brain networks. After college, he pursued quantitative research in neuroimaging via a master’s in computational biology and NIH’s Oxford-Cambridge MD/PhD Program. His PhD mapped functional and structural brain MRI differences in youth with childhood-onset schizophrenia. Subsequently, he completed medical school at UCLA, becoming passionate about helping people living with psychiatric conditions. He went on to psychiatry residency at Yale, where he also pursued scientific training in psychiatric genetics. In neuroimaging, molecular mechanisms of brain alterations are often elusive; in psychiatric genetics, it remains unknown how risk loci impact the brain. His work grew to target the mutually informative intersection of these approaches. After residency, Dr. Alexander-Bloch was recruited to the University of Pennsylvania and The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. In the following six years, he grew an independent research program integrating with his clinical work in first-episode psychosis programs. Supported by three NIH R01s, his lab uses neuroimaging and genetics to investigate child brain development and the maturational trajectories that lead to psychosis and other neurodevelopmental psychiatric conditions.