DART Program

Dr. Azevedo’s Laboratory seeks to understand how emotional experiences, such as trauma or reward, are processed and integrated in the brain. Our main goal is to determine the circuit, cellular and molecular mechanisms by which emotions control behavior and physiology. Ultimately, we aim to understand and define novel molecular targets involved in psychiatric diseases, such as Eating Disorders, PTSD, and Anxiety. Using the mouse limbic system as our primary model, our laboratory employs a combination of behavioral, molecular, anatomical, and imaging tools.

Dr. Becker's overall research focus is directed at elucidating neurobiological mechanisms and environmental factors underlying the addictive effects of alcohol, including adaptive changes resulting from chronic alcohol exposure that play a role in promoting excessive alcohol consumption and enhanced relapse vulnerability.

Dr. Bharioke's lab focuses on looking at neuronal activity throughout the lifespan. They mostly use two-photon imaging to study cortical activity both in living embryos (during development) and in adult mice. Their goals are to understand:

(1) how neurons generate the cognitive functions that serve to define who we are, and

(2) how to manipulate that activity in order to correct defects associated with neurological disorders. His background is in both computational and experimental neuroscience, and the lab uses methods from both those angles, building models of neuronal circuits based on experimental data.

Director of the Division of Bio-behavioral Medicine and Assistant Provost, Interprofessional Initiatives

Licensed Clinical Psychologist

Dr. Borckardt is studying the effects of minimally invasive brain stimulation technologies such as Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) and Vagus Nerve Stimulation (VNS) on pain perception in healthy adults, patients with depression, and patients with chronic pain conditions of various etiologies.

Dr. Brown is a Research Assistant Professor in Addiction Sciences at MUSC.  Her research focuses disparities in substance use disorders and comorbid stress-related conditions ( e.g., PTSD, trauma, early childhood adversity) that impact women and African Americans.  She is currently examining the impact of race-related stress among individuals with alcohol use disorder and PTSD. She is also conducting a laboratory study to investigate sex differences in the impact of early childhood stress on opioid craving among men and women with opioid use disorder.

Dr. Danielson's research interests focus on treatment and prevention with high-risk adolescent and traditionally underserved populations, including basic and translational science studies that inform applied clinical research. Her particular areas of research and clinical expertise are in:

1) evaluating and disseminating integrated treatments for comorbid PTSD and substance use problems, as well as HIV sexual risk behaviors, among trauma-exposed adolescents, and

2) understanding the pathways from trauma and stress exposure to mental health problems.

Senior Mentor

Dr. Gex’s research focuses on improving the efficacy of brief interventions for substance use prevention and early intervention to reduce substance use related harms and the risk of developing substance use disorders (SUDs), and to improve overall health outcomes across the lifespan. She is especially interested in understanding behavioral and intervention mechanisms that lead to increased motivation for behavior change among individuals who use cannabis.

Constance Guille is the Director of the Women’s Reproductive Behavioral Health Division and Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at MUSC. Dr. Guille completed her psychiatry residency training and subspecialty training in perinatal psychiatry at Yale University. She established the Women’s Reproductive Behavioral Health Division at MUSC. She enjoys spending time with her husband and two daughters.

Dr. Guille has transitioned her research into the area of Perinatal Psychiatry investigating biological markers of postpartum depression. Her clinical practice focuses on the management of mental health problems in pregnancy and postpartum.

Dr. Christine Hahn leads the Recovery and Early Support for Trauma (R.E.S.T.) lab which focuses on development and testing of early interventions that can prevent and reduce substance misuse and traumatic stress following recent exposure to violence. Her translational program of research utilizes novel, efficient technology-based interventions focused on improving recovery for sexual violence survivors and victims of other types of crime. Dr. Hahn is also interested in community participatory research methods and integrating evidence-based care in real-world settings such as sexual assault advocacy centers.

Dr. Jarnecke believes that people’s relationships and social connectedness are key to well-being; thus, her primary research focuses on the ways that interpersonal relationships affect recovery from substance use and after trauma. She is currently co-leading a community-based research study that is developing and testing a digital tool to better detect and connect individuals with resources for intimate partner violence and co-occurring mental health conditions in substance use treatment settings. She is also working on research to better understand the neurobiology underlying alcohol use disorder and PTSD and disseminate treatments that help patients heal from substance use and PTSD.

Program Director, Med-Peds Resident Program

Dr. Kalivas is an associate professor with dual appointment in the departments of Psychiatry and Medicine and now serves as Program Director for the Combined Internal Medicine and Psychiatry Residency Program. He graduated medical school from MUSC. He is a former chief resident of our med-psych program in 2016 and internal medicine chief resident in 2017. He then joined faculty at MUSC where he works as an academic hospitalist for the Department of Medicine and as part of the Brain Stimulation Service for the Department of Psychiatry. His research focus is detection and management of delirium in hospitalized patients. He also serves as the Medical Director for GME Quality and Safety, where he facilitates resident quality improvement projects and overall training culture at MUSC. He is passionate about education and a large part of the educational mission of both categorical and the combined training programs her at MUSC.

Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences

Dr. Li has one NIH project and one VA project that are currently ongoing. Dr. Li's lab uses fMRI to guide TMS for smoking cessation. Their interest areas include brain stimulation and brain imaging in tobacco use disorder. 

Dr. López’s research interests include identification of barriers to treatment engagement in mental health services, the use of culturally tailored interventions as a means of engaging specific high-risk groups in prevention and behavioral health services (e.g., HIV prevention, prevention of child maltreatment), increasing visibility and access of trauma related services to Latinx and other underserved populations (e.g. Telemedicine), and assessment of provider-level factors that affect youth and family involvement in outpatient community-based therapy.

Dr. Lopez's research interests are the effect of stress and other environmental factors on alcohol intake and relapse, and the role of learning in the development of addictive behaviors. He is conducting studies to evaluate the effect of stress at different developmental stages on voluntary alcohol intake. Dr. Lopez conducts behavioral pharmacology studies utilizing numerous rodent models of alcohol exposure. This includes studying alcohol dependence and relapse drinking involving a mouse model of chronic intermittent ethanol (CIE) exposure that produces escalation of drinking. This model has been used to characterize genetic, neurobiological, and behavioral (motivational) factors that influence alcohol self-administration including measures of relapse, tolerance, and behavioral flexibility.

Dr. McCauley is a clinical psychologist who has led efforts to disseminate best practices in opioid prescribing to dental professionals. She will head up the Health Care Systems Liaison Core.

Dr. McCauley's general research interests focus on the dissemination and implementation of multi-level interventions targeting prescription opioid abuse and its common comorbidities (e.g., pain, traumatic stress, depression). In addition, Dr. McCauley is an active collaborator on projects to develop, evaluate, and implement indicated prevention and early intervention programming for youth and adults at-risk for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), substance use disorders, and HIV/STI.

Dr. Erin A. McClure is a behavioral psychologist and an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Medical University of South Carolina. Dr. McClure earned her B.S. in Psychology and Neuroscience from Allegheny College and her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Florida. The overarching goal of Dr. McClure’s program of research is broadly focused on reducing the harmful impact of cannabis and tobacco/nicotine product use across the lifespan. Her research has focused on refining and evaluating strategies to improve long-term abstinence and prevent relapse, as well as pursuing harm reduction strategies to minimize the adverse impact of substance use; all utilizing technology to improve remote procedures and data quality, as well as to increase reach and accessibility.

Dr. McTeague’s work within the Brain Stimulation Laboratory is focused on PTSD, the aim is purposefully transdiagnostic—with implications for highly related anxiety and mood disorders and trauma exposure. Specifically, her work utilizes transcranial magnetic stimulation, concurrent with fMRI, as a causal probe of neural network integrity and susceptibility to perturbation in chronic and refractory anxiety and depression.

Dr. Mellick is conducting a high-risk multimodal neuroimaging study that aims to identify potential reward circuitry based endophenotypes for co-occurring bipolar disorder and alcohol use disorder (BD+AUD). In addition, he is the principal investigator for a pilot project evaluating bar-laboratory methods for the study of subjective response to alcohol and choice drinking in BD+AUD.

Dr. Prisciandaro's research focuses on individuals with Bipolar Disorder and Substance Use Disorder. His lab work is primarily in brain imaging and neuropsychopharmacology.

The Rinker Lab is a preclinical, basic science lab that explores the neurobiological mechanisms that underlie alcohol dependence and stress-related disorders using a murine model of excessive alcohol consumption that emulates aspects of this human medical condition of Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD). The lab has several main projects that focus on stress system dysregulation in alcohol dependence, cortical mechanisms of excessive alcohol drinking, and thalamic regulation of reward seeking. We utilize in vivo calcium imaging to track neural activity during alcohol drinking and behavioral tasks, as well as chemo- and optogenetic approaches to manipulate neural activity, and basic wet lab techniques, like immunohistochemistry, western immunoblotting, and slice electrophysiology. The overall goal of the lab is to help understand the etiology of AUD and identify new pharmacotherapeutics targets for drug development.

Dr. Santa Ana is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at MUSC and the Evidence-Based Training Coordinator for the VISN 7 Homeless Program at the Department of Veterans Affairs. She is a core investigator within HEROIC at the Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center and she collaborates with other MUSC faculty in Psychiatry on projects involving PTSD, substance use disorder, relapse prevention, and chronic pain for patients with substance use and other co-existing disorders.\

Dr. Santa Ana works on the development and efficacy testing of innovative methods designed to deliver evidence-based treatments. She has experience with group motivational interviewing targeting substance use disorders and tobacco dependence among dually diagnosed patients.

Academic Focus: nicotine and tobacco use, tobacco control, e-cigarettes, tobacco product regulation.

The goal of Dr. Smith’s research is to reduce the harms associated with smoking, with a focus on regulatory science. One arm of her research has focused on tobacco regulations that can reduce the appeal and addictiveness of combustible tobacco — the most harmful form of tobacco. This includes a decade of research related to reducing the nicotine level within cigarettes to minimally addictive levels, and new research investigating the impact of banning menthol within cigarettes. Another arm of Dr. Smith’s research focuses on the impact of non-combustible tobacco products on public health, including both their potential to serve as harm reduction tools for current smokers and their potential to increase harm for youth and non-smokers who initiate tobacco use with these products. Dr. Smith is currently conducting several trials that test the impact of e-cigarettes on smoking behavior and smoking abstinence among current smokers. Dr. Smith is passionate about mentoring and works with trainees at a variety of levels, including high school students, undergraduates, graduate students, psychology interns, and postdoctoral fellows.

Dr. Squeglia is the co-Director of the MUSC Youth Collaborative, and her National Institutes of Health-supported research focuses on:

(1) understanding the effects of alcohol and cannabis use on brain development and

(2) using neuroscience to improve prevention and treatment of adolescent substance use disorders.

Executive Council

The overarching goal of Dr. Tomko's research is to improve treatment outcomes for individuals with substance use disorders by understanding individual differences in substance use disorder presentation and identifying which treatments are optimal for a specific individual. 

Dr. Allison Wilkerson is an Associate Professor in the Sleep, Mood, and Anxiety Research and Treatment (SMART) Division within the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Medical University of South Carolina. She is a licensed clinical psychologist and diplomat in behavioral sleep medicine (DBSM). Her program of research is focused on:

1) understanding the impact of sleep health in underserved populations and using this knowledge to develop tailored sleep interventions;

2) leveraging technology to enhance dissemination of evidence-based assessment and treatment of sleep and mental health disorders, which includes the development and launch of online provider-facing trainings, virtual patients for practice following training, and patient facing mobile applications.