Salvador Guinjoan

Biography

I am a Board-Certified psychiatrist, currently working in the Laureate Institute for Brain Research as a Principal Investigator. I graduated from the University of Buenos Aires School of Medicine in 1992, and given my early interest in research in the neurobiology of emotions and mood disorders, I got a Ph.D. at its Dept. of Physiology with a dissertation on Autonomic Dysfunction in Mood Disorders. From 1995 to 1999 I completed a residency in general adult psychiatry at the Sheppard Pratt/University of Maryland program, where I was also inpatient chief resident. I returned to Argentina immediately after completing my residency and obtaining Board certification. I developed my early independent career in the University of Buenos Aires, where my main lines of research have involved the study of brain functioning in mood, psychotic, and neurocognitive disorders using diverse autonomic, neuromodulation, and brain imaging paradigms. Specifically, in the last 20 years of research activity in my country of origin, I have coordinated a research group active in structural and functional neuroimaging (MRI, PET) and psychophysiology studies exploring the biological underpinnings of treatment-resistant depression, brain lateralization of emotion in depression, abnormal emotional responses and social cognition in schizophrenia, and physiological, behavioral, and imaging early biomarkers of sporadic Alzheimer´s disease across the lifespan, including the initial set-up and clinical coordination until 2015, of the first and only Latin American site of the Alzheimer´s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative. Between 2015 and 2020, immediately prior to relocating in the US, I have been Chief of Psychiatry at Fleni Foundation, a University of Buenos Aires affiliated private non-for-profit clinical neuroscience institution. I have published extensively in these areas with independent local and international grants in the last 15 years. I am applying my clinical and research experience in the area of neuroimaging of emotional processes in attempting to understand the brain circuit basis of repetitive negative thinking in major depression. To this end, we are employing advanced structural and functional connectivity analyses in a propensity matched sample of persons with depression and high or low repetitive negative thinking, along with matched healthy controls. Specifically we have recently observed that brooding rumination in depression is associated with increased functional connectivity between semantic language processing, and emotional salience areas, and are planning to target this circuit with both neurofeedback and, upon approval by the FDA, a novel device of low-intensity focused ultrasound. We are also comparing the anatomical characteristics of tracts traversing historical psychosurgical targets, as well as whole-brain white matter microstructure, in the same group of propensity-matched depressive individuals with varying intensities of rumination. We hope this work will help us to achieve the ultimate goal of alleviating this symptom of depression with vast prognostic implications, including treatment resistance, proneness to relapse and chronic course, and suicide.