Yihong Zhao, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in Center of Alcohol & Substance Use Studies, and an adjunct faculty in Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, New York University Langone Health. She received an undergraduate degree in Statistics from University of California at Riverside, and a Ph.D. in Biostatistics from Columbia University. Her research focuses on developing and/or applying statistical and machine learning methods to dissect the relationships between genetic factors, neurophenotypes, and psychiatric behaviors. Dr. Zhao’s research has been supported by grants from NIAAA and the Leon Levy Neuroscience Foundation.

Dr. Zhao’s current work has a strong interdisciplinary focus, with several broad themes. Her search has been heavily focused on using novel pattern discovery and machine learning approaches to help understand the consequences of alcohol and substance misuse at genetic, brain, and behavioral levels. She is also interested in identifying risk factors that could potentially predict future alcohol and substance misuse problems. The overarching goal of these projects is to reveal novel mechanistic insights into addiction biology through integrative analysis of data from various levels (e.g., genotyping, methylation markers, transcriptome, structural MRI, functional MRI, and behavioral measures).