Dr.Halide Bilge Turkozer
Date/Time: Thursday, 4 April 2024, 16:30
Place: SC106 (UMRAM)
” Seeing through psychosis ”
Abstract: Psychotic disorders are among the leading causes of disability worldwide, causing significant suffering for those affected and major challenges to our healthcare system. Understanding developmental mechanisms of psychosis may lead to novel biomarkers that help identify risk groups more precisely and develop effective prevention and treatment strategies. The visual system is an important locus of pathology in psychotic disorders and growing evidence suggests that it is affected by neurodevelopmental factors linked to psychosis. Visual abnormalities in psychotic disorders range from visual symptoms to visual perceptual impairments, retinal changes, and visual cortical and functional abnormalities. In this talk, Dr. Turkozer will present her work on visual perceptual and visual cortical changes in individuals with psychotic disorders and youth at risk for psychosis, along with mechanistic and clinical implications of these findings.
Bio: Dr. Halide Bilge Turkozer is a clinician-scientist specializing in child and adolescent psychiatry, with a focus on investigating brain biomarkers for risk prediction and early intervention for serious mental illnesses. Dr. Turkozer received her medical degree from Ankara University School of Medicine in 2010. She worked as a researcher at the National Magnetic Resonance Research Center in Ankara from 2011 to 2012. She completed her psychiatry residency training at Marmara University School of Medicine in Istanbul in 2017. During a one-year break from her residency, she did a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Psychotic Disorders Division, McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School from 2015 to 2016. Subsequently, she pursued psychiatry training as a Research Track resident at the Department of Psychiatry, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center from 2017 to 2021. She then trained in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School, from 2021 to 2023. Currently, she is a Staff Psychiatrist and a researcher at McLean Hospital, and an Instructor at Harvard Medical School. She is the Principal Investigator of the Vision Group within McLean Hospital’s Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder Research Program.
Her research focuses on the mechanisms of cognitive and perceptual impairments in psychotic disorders and how these aspects of disease mechanism may inform clinical decision-making. Dr. Turkozer serves as a member of the Steering Committee of the Consortium for Vision and Oculomics in Psychiatry (CVOP) and a member of the Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusivity (JEDI) Committee of the Society of Biological Psychiatry (SOBP). She has received awards from the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the Society of Biological Psychiatry, McLean Hospital, and Harvard Medical School for her research and clinical work.
Lab Website: https://www.sbdpvision.com/
Publications: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Fl-hcxAAAAAJ&hl=en