Andrew Fox awarded NIH grant to study anxiety

Anxiety and depressive disorders are common, comorbid, and challenging to treat, ranking them among the greatest contributors to human suffering. A key challenge for psychiatry and clinical psychology is to discover, understand, and ultimately treat the root causes of these common mental health problems. Dr. Andrew Fox, Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department and the California National Primate Research Center, leverages naturally-occurring individual differences in non-human primates to model the early-life risk to develop anxiety and depressive disorders. Fox recently secured an NIH grant that will provide over $3.5 million to UC Davis in support of these efforts. Fox's newly funded project will harness an innovative combination of longitudinal measures and state-of-the-art tools—including a multi-generational pedigree, brain imaging, and deep neural networks—to objectively identify and prioritize the neural pathways that contribute to anxiety-related behavior as individuals mature into adults. Ultimately, Fox's research aims to identify new treatment targets for the treatment and prevention of stress-related psychopathology.