Upstate Psychiatry Launches Inaugural Research Day to Foster Collaboration and Showcase Innovation
This November, Upstate’s Psychiatry Department hosted its inaugural Research Day. With plans to host the event every fall, the goal is to offer students, trainees, and faculty a platform to showcase their latest research and scholarly activity along with a unique opportunity for networking and collaboration.

Nevena Radonjic, MD/PhD, discusses research being presented at the Department of Psychiatry's inaugural Research Day.
"We have so many strengths in our department and much research is being done not only in our research division but also in our clinical divisions,” says Nevena Radonjic, MD/PhD. Radonjic is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and an organizer of Psychiatry Research Day. "This is a great opportunity for everybody to come together, learn about each other's projects and interests, and see how to collaborate in the future.”
Collaboration is a key benefit to events like Research Day. Wei-Dong Yao, PhD, is using the event to gain a better understanding of psychiatric research being done from the clinical side of Upstate.
“There’s a gap between the faculty research labs and the clinical divisions,” Yao explains. As a Distinguished Professor and Vice Chair of Research of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, he sees this as a great forum to connect with clinicians. “It’s nice to see their presentations and data; I think having a better understanding of their research will help us in basic science ask more clinically relevant questions.”
Radonjic and Yao have seen Upstate’s psychiatry program grow over the past decade and are excited to see the current trajectory continue.
“We are certainly seeing a lot of need for growth, given the clinical demands,” explains Radonjic. “We've seen our researchers do an exemplary job in response to COVID and meeting the community's needs.”
Yao has seen the psychiatry department almost double in recent years and sees them expanding into new fields like artificial intelligence, genomics, and computational neuroscience.

2024 Upstate Psychiatry's Research Day
“We have a robust presence of data scientists, one of the strongest in the country. Combining that with what we do in basic mechanistic sciences, I see a lot of potential. We can depend on their data to develop new questions and hypotheses, and we can design mechanistic experiments to test these hypotheses and ideas.”
You can find out more about the work being done by Upstate’s psychiatry department here-
https://www.upstate.edu/psych/research/index.php