Greg Fonzo, Ph.D.

Greg Fonzo, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and co-director of the Center for Psychedelic Research and Therapy at Dell Medical School. He is also a courtesy assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin.

Fonzo graduated summa cum laude from the University of Georgia Honors Program in 2005 with a dual bachelor’s degree in biology and psychology. He received his doctorate in clinical psychology in 2013 from the San Diego State University/University of California, San Diego, Joint Doctoral Program. He completed his clinical internship at the Memphis Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

Prior to joining the faculty at Dell Medical School, Fonzo completed two postdoctoral research fellowships. The first was a T32 biobehavioral research fellowship in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The second was an advanced fellowship in mental illness at the Sierra-Pacific Mental Illness Research, Education and Clinical Center at the Palo Alto Veterans Affairs Health Care System.

Fonzo’s research focuses broadly on understanding mechanisms of affective disorder psychopathology and treatment and leveraging this understanding to improve clinical care and patient outcomes. His lab takes a multimodal approach to assessing disorder mechanisms and characteristics across diagnostic categories, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorders and depression. He is particularly interested in the biological bases of affective symptoms and defining biological targets to engage with novel intervention approaches. His work probes psychological processes such as emotional reactivity, emotion regulation, reward processing and affective learning to understanding neural circuits implicated in a broad array of affective psychiatric abnormalities, such as exaggerated fear/threat reactivity, diminished positive emotion, anhedonia and difficulties with regulating one’s emotional state.

Ongoing work primarily utilizes functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess brain function in-vivo and is increasingly focused on integrating computational modeling approaches to understand information processing dysfunction in psychiatric disorders. He is also heavily invested in utilizing existing treatment modalities (e.g., psychotherapy and medications) to identify neural mechanisms of therapeutic effects, which will then serve as starting points for the development of novel brain modulation approaches with transcranial focused ultrasound and transcranial magnetic stimulation.

Fonzo’s ultimate goal is to improve clinical care for individuals living with stress-related affective disorders by discovering how current treatments work, who is best suited to receive a particular treatment and why and designing novel mechanism-focused interventions targeted to engage specific brain circuits of interest. His vision is for every individual to receive an effective, individually tailored, biologically informed evidence-based treatment.