Jill M. Goldstein, Ph.D., is a Professor of Psychiatry and Medicine, Departments of Psychiatry and Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Director of Research, Connors Center for Women’s Health & Gender Biology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She is also a Consultant in Neuroscience in Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and Senior Scientist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Dr. Goldstein was originally trained in psychiatric epidemiology at the Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and in clinical psychopathology at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Her post-doctoral training in clinical neuroscience and brain imaging was at Harvard in the Department of Behavioral Neurology at Beth Israel Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital Athinoula Martinos Biomedical Imaging Center.
Over the last 20 years, she has become an internationally-recognized expert on sex differences in the brain during development and in adulthood, and how disruption of sexually dimorphic processes can help us understand sex differences in psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, affective psychoses, and depression. She has published numerous articles in these areas and has received numerous awards to pursue this work. Her program of research, called the Clinical Neuroscience of Sex Differences in the Brain (
cnl-sd.bwh.harvard.edu), consists of an interdisciplinary team of investigators, integrating structural and functional brain imaging studies, psychophysiology, neuroendocrine studies of hormones and brain function, genetics, inflammatory factors, and collaborative efforts with animal investigators studying genes, hormones, inflammation and the brain [e.g.
mddscor.bwh.harvard.edu]. Her current NIH-funded work is focused on investigating the fetal hormonal programming of sex differences in adult onset psychiatric disorders and the co-morbidity of sex differences in psychiatric with general medical disorders, such as cardiovascular disease and the metabolic syndrome. Brain circuitries under investigation include the stress response circuitry, memory and working memory, and reward circuitry implicated in the neural circuitry of obesity. She was recently named the 2007 Spinoza Professor by the Academic Medical Center at the University of Amsterdam for her work on the role of hormones and sex differences in the brain for understanding clinical disorders in medicine.
Dr. Goldstein is also building a unique research infrastructure for the Connors Center at Brigham & Women’s Hospital to foster collaborative efforts to understand mechanisms that explain sex differences in health and disease across disciplines and methods of study and to provide a source of knowledge and training for future young scientists and clinicians in women's health and gender biology. To this end, she is also the Principal Investigator of a training grant of K-Awards for junior faculty from the NIH Office of Research in Women's Health entitled, "Hormones & Genes in Women's Health: From Bench to Bedside." For further information, see link below Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women's Health (BIRCWH).
Examples of Recent Publications:
Goldstein, JM, Seidman, LJ, Horton, NJ, Makris, N, Kennedy, DN, Caviness, VS, Faraone, SV, Tsuang, MT. Normal sexual dimorphism of the adult human brain assessed by in-vivo magnetic resonance imaging. Cerebral Cortex, 2001; 11:490-497.
Goldstein, JM, Seidman, LJ, O'Brien, LM, Horton, NJ, Kennedy, DN, Makris, N, Caviness, VS, Faraone, SV, Tsuang MT. Impact of normal sexual dimorphisms on sex differences in structural brain abnormalities in schizophrenia assessed by magnetic resonance imaging. Archives of General Psychiatry, 2002; 59:154-164.
Goldstein, JM, Jerram, M, Poldrack, RA, Breiter, HC, Makris, N, Goodman, JM, Anagnoson, R, Tsuang, M, Seidman, LJ. Sex differences in prefrontal cortical brain activity during fMRI of auditory verbal working memory. Neuropsychology, 2005; 19(4):509-519.
Goldstein JM, Jerram MW, Poldrack R, Ahern T, Kennedy DN, Seidman LJ, Makris N. Hormonal cycle modulates arousal circuitry in women using fMRI. Journal of Neuroscience, 2005; 25:9309-9316.
Goldstein, JM, Seidman, JL, Makris, N, Ahern, T, O'Brien, LM, Caviness, VS, Kennedy, DN, Faraone, SV, Tsuang, MT. Hypothalamic abnormalities in schizophrenia: Sex effects and genetic vulnerability. Biological Psychiatry, 2007; 61:935-945.
Goldstein, MJ, Buka, S, Seidman, LJ, Tsuang, MT. Specificity of the transmission of schizophrenia psychosis spectrum and affective psychoses in the New England Family Studies high risk design. Archives of General Psychiatry, 2009; accepted for publication.
Links:
Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women's Health (BIRCWH)
Clinical Neuroscience Lab of Sex Differences in the Brain
Connors-BRI Center for Research on Women's Health & Gender Biology
Harvard Medical School, Department of Psychiatry
Specialized Center of Research on Sex Differences in Depression (SCOR)
Contact Information
Jill M. Goldstein, Ph.D.
Brigham and Women's Hospital
One Brigham Circle, OBC-3-34R
1620 Tremont Street
Boston, MA 02120
email: jill_goldstein@hms.harvard.edu
assistant: Lisa Cushman-Daly at lcushman-daly@partners.org
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