Dr. Eyler received her undergraduate degree from Duke University in 1991 and her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1996. She then completed a clinical psychology internship at UCSD and the San Diego VA, with a focus on neuropsychological assessment and adult outpatient psychotherapy.
Dr. Eyler’s research program is currently supported by several NIH grants on which she is an investigator, including an R01 grant from NIMH entitled “Structural and Functional Brain Aging in Bipolar Disorder” on which she is Principal Investigator.??Dr. Eyler’s research focuses on understanding individual differences in cognitive and emotional functioning using structural and functional brain imaging. In particular, she has examined the relationship between cognitive deficits in schizophrenia and abnormalities of brain function and how these relationships may change with age. Her current NIMH-funded R01 project aims to examine whether brain structure and function appear to age more rapidly among individuals with bipolar disorder and how this may relate to increasing cognitive deficits with age.
?Dr. Eyler’s lecture titled, “Brain Imaging in Bipolar Disorder: A Window onto Mind and Mood,” will discuss how Neuroimaging studies allow scientists to explore the inner workings of the mind and learn more about how thinking and emotional processing may be affected in Bipolar Disorder. In this talk, Dr. Eyler will explain some of the most common types of neuroimaging methods and how they work. She will then present findings from studies of individuals with Bipolar Disorder that have used these techniques to measure the integrity of brain structures and how the brain functions when challenged with emotional and cognitive tasks. Exciting future directions for the use of neuroimaging in Bipolar Disorder also will be discussed.