Susanne Ahmari, M.D., Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh
“It can be hard to understand why a person with OCD can’t just stop their obsessions and compulsions—like other mental illnesses it doesn’t seem ‘real.’ But if you can identify a physical substrate behind the disease, that changes everything.”
OCD is a complex Disease
I think one of the most crucial, understudied areas in OCD is the intersection between anxiety, compulsive behaviors, and obsessions. What is it about the circuits that underlie anxiety and the circuits that underlie compulsive behaviors that interact to drive obsessions and compulsions?
Understanding the root cause
I want to attack the underlying sources that cause OCD. If you think about the people who struggle with OCD and what they have in common, it’s not a specific behavior (like hand washing or checking), nor is it a specific trigger. What they share is difficulty with one or more of the following issues: excessive initiation of repetitive tasks, excessive reinforcement of a task, and the inability to terminate a task.
From molecules to circuits
My lab is focused on identifying molecular, cellular, and circuit mechanisms that underlie abnormal repetitive thoughts and behaviors. I feel like this is what I’ve been training for all my scientific life—to try and make these bridges between the clinic and basic neuroscience.
A new way to work
The advantage of the FFOR model for active sharing across projects while working in parallel allows us to move quickly and not waste time—we regularly share the things that work and the things that fail, because both are valuable. There’s so much time wasted in science because of the lack of communication and sharing, yet, it’s essential for progress. If you want to accelerate discovery, you have to figure out how to fast fail.
