Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
Director of the Translational Neuroscience Laboratory, McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School
Director, Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center (HBTRC), McLean Hospital.
Sabina Berretta, MD, began her research training at the University of Catania, Italy. In 1990, she joined the laboratory directed by Dr. A. M. Graybiel in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, working on neural circuitry linking the motor cortex to basal ganglia. In 1997, Dr. Berretta moved to McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School to work in the laboratory directed by Dr. F. Benes. There, she developed an animal model designed to investigate GABAergic abnormalities in schizophrenia.
In 1999, Dr. Berretta became the director of the Translational Neuroscience Laboratory at McLean Hospital. Dr. Berretta and her research team at the Translational Neuroscience Lab conduct investigations on the pathophysiology of psychiatric disorders. Their studies focus on neural circuits involved in emotion processing, including the amygdala, medial thalamus, entorhinal cortex and olfactory system.
In 2014, Dr. Berretta became the Scientific Director of the HBTRC, and she became Director in 2019. Her work with the HBTRC aims at making research on nervous system disorders possible. The HBTRC does this by collecting brain donations from persons suffering from neurological, psychiatric, and neurodevelopmental conditions and distributing them to investigators across the world.
