Rajita Sinha is named the Foundations' Fund Professor

Rajita Sinha, newly appointed as the Foundations’ Fund Professor of Psychiatry, is internationally known for her research on the mechanisms linking stress to addiction.

She serves as the director of the Yale Interdisciplinary Stress Center, which focuses on the effects of stress on behavior in order to improve health outcomes relating to maladaptive behaviors. Her research focuses on investigating sex-specific neurobiological mechanisms underlying stress in humans and neurobiological alterations in stress and reward circuits associated with addictive disorders. She also develops addiction prevention and treatment strategies that target stress and emotion regulation in individuals with addiction problems and those at risk for them. She has served as the director of addiction services at the Connecticut Mental Health Center and as chief of the psychology section in the Department of Psychiatry.

Sinha has discussed on national news programs the relationship between stress and addiction, and gender issues related to addiction, and she has been featured in major news publications.

She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center and earned a clinical Ph.D. from Yale in 1992. She has been an invited speaker at international conferences and has been a visiting lecturer at Pembroke College, Cambridge University. She has received a number of honors from the National Institutes of Health, including an Independent Scientist Award, a Interdisciplinary Women’ Health Research Scholar Award and a Women’s Health Research Scholar Award. She has also been recognized with a Special Award of Excellence in Research from the College of Medicine at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, where she also received the President’s Award for Outstanding Research, and a Chairman’s Award from the Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry. She is an elected member of the College of Problems on Drug Dependence.