DEBORAH LEVY, PHD
- Harvard title(s): Associate Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychiatry
- McLean title(s): Director, Psychology Research Laboratory
- Email: dlevy@mclean.harvard.edu
- Telephone: 617-855-2854
- Fax: 617-855-2778
- Office Address: Centre Bldg, McLean Hospital, 115 Mill Street, Belmont MA 02478
- Degree(s):
- 1972 Bachelor's degree, University of Chicago
- 1976 Ph.D. in Psychology, University of Chicago
- Fellowship:
- 1977-1979 Menninger Foundation
- Board Certifications(s):
- Licensed psychologist and healthcare provider, State of MA
- Clinical Interests: Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, genetics of psychiatric disorders
- Bio: Dr. Levy received a bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in 1972 and completed a Ph.D. in Psychology at the same institution in 1976. She completed a clinical internship at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center in White Plains, New York in 1976-1977, after which she received postdoctoral training in clinical psychology at the Menninger Foundation from 1977-1979. She then returned to Chicago, where she was Director of Psychology and Chief of the Neurophysiology Laboratory at Illinois State Psychiatric Institute (ISPI). While at ISPI, Dr. Levy studied aspects of oculomotor function, particularly smooth pursuit eye movements, in order to characterize the nature of this dysfunction in schizophrenia. These studies established the independence of eye tracking dysfunction from treatment with antipsychotic medications, its specificity for schizophrenia, its co-familiality and its genetic underpinnings. After moving to Hillside Hospital-Long-Island Jewish Medical Center in 1987, Dr. Levy continued her work on eye tracking dysfunction and launched a family study to examine the co-aggregation of several other endophenotypes for schizophrenia among first-degree relatives. She showed that thought disorder, another trait that is associated with schizophrenia, is found in a substantial proportion of clinically well first-degree relatives. Further, the same characteristics of thought disorder that distinguish adult-onset schizophrenic and bipolar patients are also found in adolescent-onset patients. After moving to McLean Hospital in 1991, Dr. Levy expanded her research to include other co-familial traits (evoked potentials, craniofacial dysmorphology) and to probe the pathophysiology of eye tracking dysfunction. Dr. Levy's current work is heavily focused on identifying risk genes for schizophrenia and clarifying the role that endophenotypes may play in elucidating the biological actions of these genes.
Dr. Levy is Associate Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Psychology Research Laboratory at McLean Hospital. Dr. Levy is a reviewer for numerous journals and is a permanent member of a NIMH grant review panel. She has been invited to speak at many national and international meetings.
Dr. Levy has received research support from the National Institute of Mental Health, The National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD), the Sidney R. Baer, Jr. Foundation, Scottish Rite, and private donors. She is the recipient of the Karl Menninger Scientific Day Award from the Alumni Association of the Menninger School of Psychiatry, the Valerie Schoenfeld Award, Mental Health Association in Suffolk County, New York, and the Philip S. Holzman Memorial Investigator Award from NARSAD.
- Curriculum vitæ: (PDF format)
- Publications:
Selected Publications- Levy DL, Holzman PS, Matthysse S, Mendell NR. Eye tracking dysfunction and schizophrenia: A critical perspective. Schizophrenia Bulletin 1993;19:461-536.
- Matthysse S, Holzman PS, Gusella J, Levy DL, Harte C, Jørgensen A, Møller, L, Parnas. Linkage of eye movement dysfunction to chromosome 6p in schizophrenia: A confirmation. American Journal of Medical Genetics, 2004;128B:30-36.
- Titone D, Ditman T, Holzman PS, Eichenbaum H, Levy DL. Transitive inference in schizophrenia: Impairments in relational memory organization. Schizophrenia Research, 2004;68:235-247.
- Levy DL, O'Driscoll G, Matthysse S, Cook, S, Holzman PS, Mendell NR. Antisaccade performance in biological relatives of schizophrenia patients: A meta-analysis. Schizophrenia Research, 2004;71:113-125.
- Levy DL, Bowman E, Abel LA, Krastoshevsky O, Krause V, Mendell NR. Does performance on the standard antisaccade task meet the co-familiality criterion for an endophenotype? Brain & Cognition, 2008;68:462-475.
- Sung H, Ji F, Levy DL, Matthysse, S, Mendell NR. The power of linkage analysis of a disease-related endophenotype using asymmetrically ascertained sib pairs. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis 2008, doi:10.1016/j.csda.2008.08.030.
- Chen Y, Grossman ED, Bidwell LC, Yurgelun-Todd D, Gruber SA, Levy DL, Nakayama K, Holzman PS. Altered posterior and prefrontal cortical activation during visual motion processing in schizophrenia. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, 2008; 8:293-303.
- Levy DL, Sweeney, JA. Eye tracking and mental illness. In: Squire LR, editor-in-chief. Encyclopedia of Neuroscience (CD ROM), Academic press, Oxford, 2008, pp. 179-184.
