Fear, Vigilance, and Threat: Unraveling the Role of the Amygdala in PTSD

Dr. Rajendra Morey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine, core faculty in the Duke-UNC Brain Imaging and Analysis Center, Director of the Neuroimaging Core of the VA Mid-Atlantic Mental Illness, Research, Education, and Clinical Center (MIRECC), and staff psychiatrist at the Durham VA Medical Center. Dr. Morey received a BS in Computer Engineering and an MS in Computer Science from Case Western Reserve University, and a MD degree from Hahnemann University (now Drexel University) School of Medicine in 1997. After completing residency training in general psychiatry at the University of New Mexico and an NIMH extramural research fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with Drs. Jeffrey Lieberman and Aysenil Belger, he started at Duke and the Durham VA.Current research interests include: elucidating how PTSD symptoms alter the balance of prefrontal-limbic signaling during tasks of executive function, emotional distraction, symptom provocation, and memory function, leading to novel insights regarding the neural circuits associated with cognitive and emotional deficits in PTSD; developing a diagnostic approach for TBI using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) that can be applied at the single subject level; and assessing the merits of competing neuroimaging methodologies for structural MRI morphometry and volumetry.