ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2024
The Young Physician-Scientist Awards (YPSA) recognize physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research.
About the awardee
Youngsun T. Cho, MD, PhD is a board-certified child, adolescent and adult psychiatrist who works as a physician-scientist at Yale School of Medicine. She is an Assistant Professor jointly appointed in the Child Study Center and Department of Psychiatry. Her journey towards becoming a physician-scientist began when she was a MD/PhD student at the University of Rochester, where she became fascinated with mechanisms of the brain, and how these go awry in psychiatric illness. Her PhD thesis examined the structure and function of brain regions important for emotional processing. She published on connections of the amygdala in non-human primates, and reward processing in human adolescents and adults using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
Following this, Dr. Cho came to Yale for a research residency in psychiatry. She continued to use neuroimaging to study reward processing, additionally examining how rewards impact cognition. Motivation and cognition are often examined separately, but significantly impact one another, as shown by her group and others. Additionally, the associated impairments co-occur across many psychiatric illnesses, and impact a patient’s functioning. During residency, Dr. Cho designed a motivated working memory task, and, using fMRI, showed that reward and loss incentives improve working memory through neural signal changes in the prefrontal and parietal cortex.
Dr. Cho also became interested in development. Motivational and cognitive brain systems undergo substantial growth during childhood and adolescence. Many psychiatric illnesses also emerge in adolescence, suggesting links between developmental changes and illness. Due to this interest, she completed a Child and Adolescent Psychiatry fellowship at Yale, and began to steer her research towards a developmental perspective. She was awarded a K23 award to examine motivated working memory in adolescents with depression and typically developing adolescents, and became faculty in 2020. Moving forward, Dr. Cho remains excited to build her career as a physician-scientist who uses research and clinical care to improve the lives of those with psychiatric illness.