The Duke Center for Autism and Brain Development has been awarded a $12 million federal grant to develop artificial intelligence tools for detecting autism during infancy and identifying brain-based biomarkers of autism.

Congratulations to our trainees on the many external awards and honors they earned during the 2021-2022 academic year.

Understanding intersecting cultural identities — and providing care that respects and affirms those identities — is at the heart of Tyson Pankey’s work as a clinician, educator, and researcher. Pankey, who joined the Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences faculty in September 2021, wants to help flip the script on how health care providers talk to and care for people in the LGBTQ+ community.

Avion Simon and his siblings are among the more than 200,000 children and teens who have lost a parent or caregiver to COVID. Experts including Duke Psychiatry's Dr. Ernestine Briggs-King say—and research has demonstrated—that the trauma of losing a parent can have lifelong effects on our mental as well as physical health. This brief Scientific American documentary explores Avion's experience as an orphan, the effects of adverse childhood experiences and what can be done to minimize the long-term consequences of traumas like this one

Jeffrey Swanson, PhD, can answer a lot of questions about gun violence. But as public shootings with multiple casualties have seemed to become an epidemic, Swanson has juggled a heavy schedule of media interviews in which reporters repeatedly ask a question he can't answer: why? In this article, he discusses some of the complexities of the issue.

A new documentary from local TV station WRAL, "Pandemic Generation: Kids in Crisis," shines a light on the real, lasting impacts of remote learning, quarantine and the uncertainty our kids have endured over the past two years. Duke Psychiatry's Ernestine Briggs-King, PhD, Robin Gurwitch, PhD, and Gary Maslow, MD, MPH, are among the featured mental health experts.

Over the past year, leaders from the Duke Center for Autism and Brain Development, Office for Institutional Equity, Faculty Advancement, and Disability Management have met with Duke students and team members from the university and health system to discuss how to better ​​​support inclusion and equity efforts related to neurodiversity across the Duke campus.

P. Murali Doraiswamy, MBBS, FRCP, gave expert testimony to the U.S. Senate Armed Forces Subcommittee on Personnel on April 6, 2022, at the U.S. Senate in Washington DC on the potential applications of digital tools in mental health. Learn more in this NC Policy Watch article.

COVID-19 health care workers experienced high rates of potential moral injury that are comparable to rates among military veterans, according to a collaborative study between Duke University, Vanderbilt University, and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The study was led by Duke Psychiatry's Jason Nieuwsma, PhD.

Dr. Uche Aneni, who completed her psychiatry residency in 2018, is now an instructor of clinical child psychiatry in the Child Study Center in the Yale School of Medicine and the associate director of the play2PREVENT Lab at the Yale Center for Health & Learning Games. Read about her path from Ibadan, Nigeria, to New Haven, Connecticut.