Welcome to our web site, where you can learn about our research program, staff, and publications.

If you learned of this site from a flier or may be interested in participating in our research studies, and would like more information, this site also provides information about our current studies and answers to common questions and concerns.

Research Program

We use functional MRI, a powerful method for looking at patterns of brain activation, to study posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and its treatment. We are particularly interested in:

• Responses to reminders of traumatic experiences that have been relatively unstudied in research on the biology of PTSD, including dissociation and hypo-arousal.
• Problems experienced by people with histories of severe trauma that are not adequately captured by the psychiatric diagnosis of PTSD, including difficulties regulating negative emotions in general, not only fear associated with past traumas.
• The neural circuitry of interactions between emotion, attention, perception, cognition and behavior, in those with trauma histories and PTSD and psychologically healthy people.

Our goals are to conduct biological research that serves traumatized people and their clinicians, to contribute to the emerging integration of emotion and self-regulation into cognitive neuroscience, and to communicate our work with clarity and integrity to scientists, clinicians, and a variety of other audiences.

Who & Where We Are

Dr. Lanius graduated from the University of British Columbia with a combined M.D. and Ph.D. degree in Neuroscience in 1996. She continued her training at the University of Western Ontario, where she completed her residency in psychiatry in 2000. Since the summer of 2000, she has been an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Western Ontario. She established and directs the Traumatic Stress Service, a program that specializes in the treatment and research of PTSD and related disorders. Her research focuses on the neural correlates of PTSD using fMRI and treatment outcomes of pharmacological and psychotherapeutic methods. Her research is currently funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Ontario Mental Health Foundation, the Department of National Defense of Canada, and Pfizer Incorporated.

Dr. Hopper is a researcher and therapist with a doctorate in clinical psychology, which he received from the University of Massachusetts Boston in 1997. He has studied the lasting effects of child abuse and other traumatic experiences – initially the psychological and behavioral effects in men, more recently effects on memories, biology and the regulation of emotion in people with PTSD. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Behavioral Psychopharmacology Research Laboratory in the Neuroimaging Center of McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where he will be conducting brain imaging studies on substance dependence, including in people with histories of abuse and PTSD. He has received funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Eli Lilly and Company, and Pfizer Incorporated. Dr. Hopper also maintains a web site on child abuse issues that receives over half a million visitors a year and is required reading for many college courses.

Our research is conducted at the University Hospital of the London Health Sciences Center, on the campus of the University of Western Ontario, where Drs. Lanius and Hopper have appointments in the Department of Psychiatry. Our fMRI studies are conducted at the Imaging Research Laboratories of the John P. Robart's Institute, in collaboration with several colleagues including Dr. Ravi Menon, a pioneer in fMRI research.