Joanna Steinglass, MD is a Professor in Clinical Psychiatry and the Associate Director of the Eating Disorders Research Clinic at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Dr. Steinglass graduated from Amherst College and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Steinglass also serves as Training Co-Director of the Eating Disorders Research Fellowship, and has a coveted NIMH mid-career award for Training and Mentoring in Eating Disorders Research. She completed her psychiatry training at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and completed an NIMH-supported post-doctoral fellowship in research.
Dr. Steinglass applied a cognitive neuroscience lens to develop and test a model of Anorexia Nervosa. Her work built on recent advances in decision sciences and asked, for the first time, what neural circuits guide choices of what to eat among individuals with Anorexia Nervosa. She conducts interdisciplinary research that uses tools from cognitive and computational neuroscience to apply the latest understanding of the healthy brain to research on Anorexia Nervosa. Her research has led to the discovery that individuals with Anorexia Nervosa are using different brain systems than healthy individuals when making decisions about what to eat. She has paired this finding with the development of a novel treatment intervention that provide converging evidence for a habit-based model of Anorexia Nervosa.
Dr. Steinglass is currently conducting a large NIMH-funded longitudinal study of adolescents with Anorexia Nervosa. She is examining reward and habit neural systems, comparing between patients and healthy adolescents, and identifying neural predictors of longer-term illness course. In addition, her research leverages recent advances in computational neuroscience to more deeply examine how maladaptive restrictive eating occurs – and is reinforced – in patients with Anorexia Nervosa. She provides mentorship in clinical research in eating disorders across all levels of trainees, from medical students to postdoctoral fellows and young investigators.
