Suzanne Haber, Ph.D.
Principal Investigator, Haber Lab, University of Rochester
“OCD is particularly painful for young people—they are aware on some level that there is something not quite the same as with their friends, but they don’t want to admit it.”
My focus is circuits
My background and interests have always been in the circuitry of the brain. In particular, the parts that mediate things like reward, punishment, aversive behaviors, positive behaviors, and cognitive behaviors— all of the elements that go into decision-making.
Circuits control everything
When a person or an organism makes a good decision or a bad decision, it's usually based on some sort of sensory input, some information processing, and a motor output onto the world. My expertise is focused not on the two ends of sensory input or motor output, but on the processing that happens between the two. I’ve spent my entire career exploring what I call the ‘hard wiring’ in the brain. How is the brain connected? What are these connections and how are they organized? Which part of this part of the cortex talks to which part of that part of cortex?
circuit dysfunctions and OCD
For many psychiatric disorders, it is now generally believed that there is a disruption in a distributed network of some kind—that there is a circuit dysfunction. What this means for OCD is that we’re moving away from thinking that there is a “sweet spot” in the brain, a little piece of real estate that is abnormal. We’re now thinking more along the lines that it’s the communication between a number of different regions that, together, are modulating a particular behavior.
FFOR and the future of OCD
FFOR’s mission is to change the world of OCD, and they’re doing that through multiple projects running in parallel, each of them coming at the concept of circuitry from a different place, to ultimately locate abnormalities. They’re embracing out-of-the-box ideas and throwing everything at developing a therapy for treatment-resistant OCD, and that’s exciting.