MIRECC / CoE

VISN 4 MIRECC Newsflash

Winter 2025

Year in Review

As we embark on the coming year, I wanted to take a moment to celebrate some of our Center’s achievements in 2024. Our MIRECC theme, Precision Mental Health Care (PMHC), drives our mission forward to enhance care for Veterans in many ways. A few highlights:

• Contributions to the Million Veteran Program (MVP) have unveiled key insights into genetic factors underlying substance use disorders. This research informs future translational studies and lays the groundwork for better, more personalized health care for Veterans.
• We continue supporting the VA-wide implementation of BHL Touch. This user-friendly tool empowers Veterans to conveniently complete questionnaires on their own devices, seamlessly interfacing with the electronic health record. BHL Touch has expanded its reach from behavioral health to primary care screenings and now supports 4,300 uses across VA daily.
• Our commitment to educating the clinical workforce through accredited offerings has provided opportunities locally and across our VISN, as well as through popular national webinars.
• Two of our postdoctoral fellows secured pilot funding for innovative projects that propel our PMHC mission forward. Additionally, two fellowship alumni are working on Career Development Award projects, buoyed by continuing excellent mentorship and community support at our Center.
• Looking ahead, we are preparing to launch an exciting new study focused on personalizing treatment approaches for treatment-resistant depression and sleep problems for Veterans.

I am excited about what 2025 holds for our Center and appreciate your continued support. Together, we are advancing health care for our Veterans.

David Oslin, M.D.

Director, VISN 4 MIRECC

Michele Bertocci, Ph.D. investigates the intersection of neural measures, clinical/behavioral assessments, and peripheral tests with the goal of identifying markers of psychopathology to improve diagnosis and treatment of bipolar disorder and other psychopathology. She is especially interested in identifying peripheral measures that reflect the relationship between neural metabolism and neural activity. She uses 7 Tesla Magnetic Resonance Spectral Imaging (MRSI), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), actigraphy, and peripheral markers to interrogate these systems. She also has a keen interest in traditional machine learning variable selection models such as Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) and Elastic net, both in the family of Regularized Regression.

Dr. Bertocci worked for many years in the mental health field prior to completing her doctoral and post-doctoral work at the University of Pittsburgh. She is currently Assistant Professor in Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, where she studies bipolar disorder in adults and children.

Joshua Gordon, M.D., Ph.D. is interested in research on mental health and suicide, with a focus on identifying particular risk and resiliency factors that can both predict risk for suicide as well as identify areas for intervention. He is particularly interested in the ways that multifactorial social stressors and trauma may impact Veteran mental health and suicide. He hopes to combine his clinical experiences as a clinical psychiatrist with a background in epidemiology to contribute to impactful research for Veteran well-being and health.  

Dr. Gordon completed his M.D. and Ph.D. in epidemiology at the University at Buffalo and research track psychiatry residency at the University of Pennsylvania.

Eric Meyer, Ph.D. is focused on research around improving long-term functioning and quality of life in people living with complex combinations of trauma-related behavioral health challenges, including posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, substance use disorders, chronic pain, and traumatic brain injury. He is particularly interested in the potential of mindfulness-based behavioral interventions to improve functioning and quality of life. He also conducts research testing interventions to prevent the development of trauma-related mental health challenges. Much of this work focuses on active-duty military personnel, Veterans, and emergency responders. He has served as a trainer for VA’s national training program in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

Dr. Meyer completed his doctoral degree in clinical psychology from the State University of New York at Binghamton, predoctoral internship at the VA Boston Healthcare System and the National Center for PTSD, and postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School. He is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Counseling and Behavioral Health at the University of Pittsburgh.

Tae Woo Park, M.D., M.Sc. is a board-certified psychiatrist and health services researcher with interests in using pharmacoepidemiology and machine learning approaches to studying the risks and benefits of benzodiazepine use in people who use opioids and management of patients with co-occurring substance use and mental disorders in specialty and general medical settings. As Co-Director of the VA Interprofessional Advanced Fellowship in Addiction Treatment, he helps lead efforts in the recruitment and training of health professionals in addiction research, with the aim of guiding fellows interested in pursuing careers as clinician-investigators in VA.

Dr. Park received his doctorate from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and completed his General Adult Psychiatry Residency and Addiction Psychiatry Fellowship at UPMC Western Psychiatric Hospital. He was a Research Fellow in the VA Interprofessional Advanced Fellowship in Addiction Treatment at the VA Boston Healthcare System.

David Oslin, M.D. will be leading a new VA study funded by the nonprofit Center for Addiction Science, Policy, and Research (CASPR), GLP-1 Agonists as a Potential Mediator of Opioid Overdose, examining the health records of Veterans with diabetes and obesity who received a GLP-1 medication and their subsequent rates of opioid overdose and other health outcomes.

Adam Bramoweth, Ph.D. was awarded Competitive Career Development funding for his project, Enhancing PTSD Psychotherapy with Digital Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia. This pilot trial will test the feasibility, acceptability, and usability of integrating the VA Insomnia Coach mobile app, digital, self-managed Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I), with evidence-based PTSD psychotherapies in a pragmatic VA clinical setting.

Hatoum AS, Davis CN, Kember RL, Johnstone M, Oslin DW, Zinkstok JR, Burmeister M; Ethics, Position, and Public Policy Committee of the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics, Board of Directors of the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics; Agrawal A, Kranzler HR, Edenberg HJ, Gelernter J, Docherty AR, Lencz T. Concerns about genetic risk testing for opioid use disorder. Lancet Psychiatry. October 2024. [link]

Bramoweth AD, Hough CE, O'Brien EM, Klingaman EA, Deininger CJ, Ulmer CS, Boudreaux-Kelly MY, McCoy JL, Youk AO. Implementing brief behavioral treatment for insomnia in Department of Veterans Affairs Primary Care Mental Health Integration clinics: Reach outcomes from a hybrid type 3 effectiveness-implementation trial. Psychological Services. January 2025. [link]

Kranzler HR, Stone A, Schichman SA, Griffin LM, Roggenkamp H, Thase ME, Lynch KG, Oslin DW. Macrophage migration inhibitory factor and interleukin 1-β mRNA levels as predictors of antidepressant treatment response in major depression. Psychopharmacology Bulletin. January 2025. [link]

Singleton SP, Sevchik BL, Vandekar SN, Strain EC, Nayak SM, Dworkin RH, Scott JC, Satterthwaite TD. An initiative for living evidence synthesis in clinical psychedelic research. Nature Mental Health. January 2025. [link]

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