Rachel Yehuda (born 1959) is a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience, the vice chair for veterans affairs in the psychiatry department, and the director of the traumatic stress studies division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She also leads the PTSD clinical research program at the neurochemistry and neuroendocrinology laboratory at the James J. Peters VA Medical Center. In 2020 she became director of the Center for Psychedelic Psychotherapy and Trauma Research at Mount Sinai.[1]
She received her Ph.D. in psychology and neurochemistry and her M.S. in biological psychology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and completed her postdoctoral training in biological psychiatry in the psychiatry department at Yale Medical School. In 2019, she was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.[2]
She has authored more than 500 published papers, chapters, and books in the field of traumatic stress and the neurobiology of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Her interests include the study of risk and resilience factors, psychological and biological predictors of treatment response in PTSD, genetic and epigenetic studies of PTSD and the intergenerational transmission of trauma and PTSD. [3]
She has an active federally funded clinical and research program that welcomes local and international students and clinicians. Her research has focused on PTSD in combat veterans, the children of Holocaust survivors and the children of pregnant women who survived the 9/11 attacks.[4] Her work on diagnostic blood biomarkers for PTSD has yielded a patent approved in the US (9,243,293) and Europe (2334816) for diagnosis and treatment stratification for PTSD.[5]