Single session real-time fMRI neurofeedback has a lasting impact on cognitive behavioral therapy strategies.

Kathryn (Katie) Dickerson completed her B.A. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from the University of Rochester in 2006. She then joined Dr. Mauricio Delgado's lab at Rutgers University-Newark earning her Ph.D. in Behavioral and Neural Sciences in 2011. She moved to Durham and joined the lab of Dr. Alison Adcock at Duke University where she was a post-doc from 2011-2016. She received a KL2 award in 2016 and was promoted to Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University.

Katie is interested in how reward and motivation influence what we learn and remember. She focuses on studying the dopamine system in healthy humans and clinical populations using a combination of behavioral, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and real-time fMRI methods. 

Professor Strauman's research focuses on the psychological and neurobiological processes that enable self-regulation, conceptualized in terms of a cognitive/motivational perspective, as well as the relation between self-regulation and affect. Particular areas of emphasis include: (1) conceptualizing self-regulation in terms of brain/behavior motivational systems; (2) the role of self-regulatory cognitive processes in vulnerability to depression and other disorders; (3) the impact of treatments for depression, such as psychotherapy and medication, on self-regulatory function and dysfunction in depression; (4) how normative and non-normative socialization patterns influence the development of self-regulatory systems; (5) the contributory roles of self-regulation, affect, and psychopathology in determining immunologically-mediated susceptibility to illness; (6) development of novel multi-component treatments for depression targeting self-regulatory dysfunction; (7) utilization of brain imaging techniques to test hypotheses concerning self-regulation, including the nature and function of hypothetical regulatory systems and characterizing the breakdowns in self-regulation that lead to and accompany depression.

Dr. Adcock received her undergraduate degree in psychology from Emory University and her MD and PhD in Neurobiology from Yale University.  She completed her psychiatry residency training at Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute at UC-San Francisco and did neurosciences research as a postdoctoral fellow at UC-SF, the San Francisco VA Medical Center, and Stanford before joining the Duke faculty in 2007. Her work has been funded by NIDA, NIMH, NSF and Alfred P. Sloan and Klingenstein Fellowships in the Neurosciences, and the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, and honored by NARSAD awards, the 2012 National Academy of Sciences Seymour Benzer Lectureship, and the 2015 ABAI BF Skinner Lectureship. The overall goals of her research program are to understand how brain systems for motivation support learning and to use mechanistic understanding of how behavior changes biology to meet the challenge of developing new therapies appropriate for early interventions for mental illness.