Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences
Mentor: Alik Widge, M.D., Ph.D., Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences
Project: Dual mechanisms of deep-brain stimulation (DBS) to enhance cognitive control in treatment-resistant mental illnesses
Patients with severe mental illnesses, such as treatment-resistant depression and OCD, suffer from decreased brain’s ability to control their unwanted thoughts and behaviors and the current treatment options to recover this ability are inefficient. Dr. Kim’s research aims to identify what brain pathways we should stimulate using deep brain stimulation (DBS) to help patients with recovering their brain’s ability to control their thoughts and behaviors, which is called cognitive control. This will provide a better understanding of how we should stimulate our brain to enhance cognitive control, which will potentially lead to a development of DBS algorithms that can benefit the cognitive control of treatment-resistant mental illnesses.
