ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2022

Albert Powers, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at Yale. He is also Director of the Powers Laboratory at Yale, and Medical and Associate Director of the Yale PRIME Psychosis Risk Clinic.  He studied Cognitive Science at Yale before moving to Nashville for Vanderbilt’s MD/PhD program, where he studied sensory neuroscience under the mentorship of Dr. Mark Wallace. His graduate work focused on the process by which the brain combines information from the different senses and how that process changes with perceptual learning. He returned to Yale for psychiatry residency and began work with Dr. Philip Corlett, a junior faculty member whose prior work focused on predictive-coding-based models of delusion formation. Utilizing Al’s background in psychophysics and sensory neuroscience and Dr. Corlett’s background in predictive coding, they devised a study to test a predictive-coding model of hallucinations. The work that resulted, published in Schizophrenia Bulletin and Science in 2017, is the first evidence for a computational model that views hallucinations as an over-weighting of Bayesian priors during perception.

Dr. Powers joined the faculty at the Yale Department of Psychiatry in July 2018 as an Assistant Professor. His current work is funded by a K23 Career Development Award and an R21from the NIMH, a Career Award for Medical Scientists from the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund, and a fellowship from the Ludwig Family Foundation. Ongoing work in his laboratory leverages an emerging understanding of the perceptual underpinnings of hallucinations to begin to elaborate a fully-defined pathway of pathogenesis ending in symptom expression and the dysfunction that often accompanies it. In service of this goal, his group employs a wide variety of techniques to understand the symptoms of psychosis as they emerge, from neuroimaging to electrophysiology to computational modeling.