Researcher at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Behavior at UCLA. She works with teenagers and young adults with early signs of schizophrenia

Dr. Carrie Bearden received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999. From 2000 to 2001 she received training in adult and pediatric neuropsychology, during her internship at the San Diego VA Medical Center and UCSD Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Services. From 2001 to 2002, Dr. Bearden became a Postdoctoral Fellow under an NIMH Neuroscience Training Grant at the Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia, where she obtained further experience in pediatric cognitive neuroscience. Dr. Bearden joined the UCLA faculty as Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA in 2003. She holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Psychology. She has received numerous awards and honors, including Young Investigator Awards from the International Congress for Schizophrenia Research and the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Affective Disorders (NARSAD), and the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP), the A.E. Bennett Neuropsychiatric Research Award for Clinical Science in Biological Psychiatry, and the Samuel Gershon Junior Investigator Award from the International Society for Bipolar Disorders. Dr. Bearden’s research aims to understand genetic influences on brain structure in the development of psychosis, using converging methods to study cognition and neuroanatomy in clinical high-risk samples (e.g., adolescents at ultra high-risk for psychosis), and in possible ‘genetic subtypes’ of the disease with very high penetrance (e.g, 22q11.2 microdeletions). Another active research project, conducted in collaboration with Dr. Nelson Freimer, is an NIMH-funded study of neural endophenotypes of bipolar disorder in a genetically isolated population in Latin America.