Chad Sylvester, MD, PhD

Chad Sylvester, MD, PhD, is an associate professor of psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Dr. Sylvester’s program of research focuses broadly on the development of functional brain networks in children with and without psychiatric disorders and uses this information to develop and test novel treatments. He has led research that relates brain function — using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) — to psychiatric symptoms or psychiatric risk in newborn infants, young children, adolescents, and adults.

Over the last couple of decades, Dr. Sylvester has used fMRI to elucidate functional brain network mechanisms of attention in healthy adults. He has also formulated, tested, and demonstrated support for a functional network model of anxiety disorders. Dr. Sylvester has led several studies that use fMRI and behavioral methods in children with and without anxiety disorders and other psychiatric illnesses. This work includes task-based fMRI of neonates in which variation in response to salient sound stimuli is related to risk trajectories for childhood anxiety disorders. He’s also used fMRI to study executive function and attention-related brain systems in children both with and without anxiety disorders. Additional work involves testing the use of novel computer-based cognitive training programs to reduce symptoms of anxiety by retraining brain systems altered by pediatric anxiety disorders.

• AACAP Robinson Cunningham Award, American Acad. of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
• Eli Robins Award, Washington University School of Medicine
• Peter Halstead Hudgens Award, Washington University School of Medicine

• Fellowship, Child Psychiatry, Washington University, 2014

• PhD, Neuroscience, Washington University, 2014
• MD, Washington University, 2009