Clinicn Investigator, Assc Prf Psychiatry, Mass General Research Institute

Associate Professor of Psychiatry Harvard Medical School

Psychiatrist Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital

MGH Research Scholar Massachusetts General Hospital

PhD University of Chicago 1996

MD University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine 1998

delusions; emotions; extinction, psychological; facial expression; fear; personal space; prefrontal cortex; schizophrenia; schizophrenic psychology; social behavior; temporal lobe

Dr. Holt has studied the neural basis of psychosis throughout her career, initially in post-mortem samples and subsequently (since 2002) using neuroimaging. Using functional neuroimaging in combination with physiology, behavioral tasks and clinical assessments, she has investigated the neurocognitive basis of the core symptoms of psychotic illness, including delusions, negative affect and social impairment, reporting some of the first evidence for abnormalities in basic mechanisms that underlie emotional perception (e.g. fear extinction memory, fear generalization, response to perceptual threat) in psychotic illness.

Recently Dr. Holt’s group has also focused on identifying changes in brain function and behavior linked with risk for serious mental illness and has been developing novel interventions aimed at increasing resilience and potentially preventing serious mental illnesses in at-risk youth. Dr. Holt also serves as Co-Director of the MGH Schizophrenia Clinical and Research Program, which includes a First-Episode and Early Psychosis Program (FEPP) focused on comprehensive treatment of psychosis in the earliest phases of illness.