Dr. Kiyohito Iigaya

 Understanding the Loss of Pleasure in Depression

Kiyohito (Kyo) Iigaya, PhD, is a Florence Irving Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University, where he leads a computational psychiatry laboratory investigating the neural and computational mechanisms underlying learning, decision-making, and psychiatric symptoms. He is also affiliated with Columbia’s Neurobiology and Behavior Program, Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, and Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. His research combines computational modeling, behavioral experiments, neuroimaging, and cross-species approaches to understand how the brain learns from experience, assigns value to future outcomes, and adapts behavior as circumstances change, with the goal of uncovering mechanisms linking individual differences in these processes to psychiatric symptoms and mental disorders. Dr. Iigaya received his PhD in Physics from Columbia University and completed postdoctoral training at University College London and Caltech.