Kathleen Garrison is an Assistant Professor in Psychiatry at Yale University. Her research interests are to better understand addiction and to improve treatments. Her research involves clinical trials of addiction treatments and brain imaging studies of the related neurobiological mechanisms. A main focus of her work is the study of mindfulness and the potential to use mindfulness training to treat addictions. Her current work uses approaches in mobile health and neuroimaging. In mobile health, her work includes clinical trials of smartphone app-based mindfulness training for smoking cessation. In neuroimaging, her background is in cognitive and clinical functional MRI, and her recent work includes fMRI studies of the mechanisms of mindfulness meditation. Her postdoc was completed at Yale, during which she used real-time fMRI neurofeedback to link brain activity to first-person experiences of focused attention in long-term meditators. Prior to that, she completed her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Southern California, MSc in Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and BS in Neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles.
