https://israelcomppsych.princeton.edu
January 29-30, 2020, Geha Mental Health Center, Petach Tikva, Israel
Organizers: Eran Eldar, Ronny Geva, Yael Niv, Gal Shoval
Registration closes: Jan 20, 2020 (midnight, Israel time)
https://israelcomppsych.princeton.edu/registration
The burdens of mental illness on both individuals and society are painful and immense. Yet psychiatry is in a crisis, as the development of new treatments has stalled. A large part of the problem is that the diagnosis of mental illnesses is based on self-reported symptoms rather than quantifiable laboratory tests. Mental health is the only domain of medicine that lacks such tests, largely because of the sore absence of a biological foundation.
One area of neuroscience that has seen tremendous progress in the last two decades is computational cognitive neuroscience – the computational and neural understanding of the processes that link reward, evaluation, affect, memory and decision making – the exact processes that are impaired in psychopathology. This has led to the creation of a new field of research: “computational psychiatry”
This meeting brings together leading researchers in this novel field, from Israel and abroad, as well as clinicians whose research is theory-driven and who are interested in collaborating with computational neuroscientists. The goal is to spur research in computational psychiatry in Israel (already home to some pioneers in the field) and to provide a setting that will be conducive to creating new international collaborations that have a potential to lead to breakthroughs in our understanding and treatment of mental disorders.
Sponsored by Geha Mental Health Center, The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities – The Batsheva de Rothschild Fund for the Advancement of Science in Israel, an unrestricted grant from Janssen Pharmaceuticals, and in collaboration with the Israeli Society for Biological Psychiatry (ISBP).