Sarah Thomas, PhD
Biography
Dr. Thomas, PhD, was mentored by Anthony Spirito, Ph.D., with a secondary mentorship by Drs. Dickstein and Brown. During fellowship, she gained experience to the use of fMRI as a method to understand how brain/behavior abnormalities can pose risk for, and be a consequence of, adolescent substance use. She worked on a project of resting state fMRI data to learn how to process and analyze neuroimaging data, which was published in 2019. During and after fellowship, she received the NIH Loan Repayment Program award twice. In 2019, she received a mentored award from Brown University’s Advance-CTR that is supported by NIH’S NIGMS. This award enabled her to conduct a project on the neural underpinnings of decision-making related to rewards in the context of cannabis use in female adolescents. With pilot data from this award, she submitted and was awarded a NIH K23 in 2021 to investigate the brain/behavior correlates of reward-related decision-making in adolescents with and without cannabis use (K23DA050911). As part of the training for her career development in this award, she began working with the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) data to learn analytical skills to apply to her acquired K23 data. Dr. Thomas has led a project to analyze the resting state brain networks associated with cognitive flexibility in approximately 1,000 youth (ages 9 and 10) from the ABCD Study. Additionally, she is a recipient of the BBRF/NARSAD Young Investigator Award, which enabled her to study the development of depression in the context of adolescent cannabis use.
After fellowship, Dr. Thomas began an appointment as an Assistant Professor in the DPHB at Brown.