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Psychiatry instructor, sleep medicine research fellow join UMMC faculty

Medical Center leadership is proud to announce the following additions to its faculty and leadership staff.

Barbara Gisabella, Ph.D.

Dr. Barbara Gisabella, recently a research fellow in the T32 Program in Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School, has joined the Medical Center faculty as an assistant professor of neurobiology and anatomical sciences.

After receiving her B.Sc. in biology from the University of Bologna, Italy, in 1997 and her M.S. in electrophysiology from Vrije University, Amsterdam, Netherlands, in 1999, Gisabella earned her Ph.D. in electrophysiology at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, in 2003. She then had postdoctoral training as a research fellow in psychiatry at Mclean Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, from 2003-04.

Gisabella joined the Harvard Medical School faculty in 2004 as an instructor in psychiatry and an assistant neuroscientist at Mclean Hospital and served there nine years before joining the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a research scientist at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. She had been a research fellow in sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School from 2017-19.

An active member of the Society for Neuroscience and the Society of Biological Psychiatry, Gisabella serves as an ad hoc reviewer for the journal Neural Plasticity. An invited speaker at five scientific conferences internationally. Gisabella is the author or coauthor of nine articles in peer-reviewed publications and two book chapters.

Her research interests include mechanisms underlying memory consolidation during sleep and the role for emotional memory dysfunction in psychiatric disorders, including PTSD and schizophrenia, and in memory deficits in aging.

 

Charalampos “Harry” Pantazopoulos, Ph.D.

Dr. Charalampos “Harry” Pantazopoulos, an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and an assistant neuroscientist at Mclean Hospital, has joined the Medical Center faculty as an assistant professor of neurobiology and anatomical sciences.

After receiving his B.S. in psychology from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2001, Pantazopoulos earned his A.L.M. in biology at Harvard University in 2006 with the first evidence for perineuronal net dysfunction in subjects with schizophrenia, and his Ph.D. in neurobiology at Northeastern University in 2010 with a focus on circadian rhythms. He then had postdoctoral training as a research fellow in psychiatry at Mclean Hospital, Harvard Medical School, from 2011-12.

Pantazopoulos joined the Harvard Medical School faculty in 2012 as an instructor in psychiatry and as an assistant neuroscientist at Mclean Hospital. He also served as a database administrative assistant for the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center’s National Brain Databank from 2010-13.

An active member of the Society for Neuroscience, the Society for Research in Biological Rhythms and the American Physiological Society, Pantazopoulos serves as an ad hoc reviewer for 10 scientific journals, co-guest editor for Frontiers in Neuroscience Frontiers Topic and guest editor for Neural Plasticity. An invited lecturer at 12 scientific meetings internationally, he is the author or coauthor of 26 articles in peer-reviewed publications and two book chapters.

Co-investigator of research grants totaling more than $6 million, Pantazopoulos’ research interests focus on identifying the neurobiological factors underlying psychiatric disorders, with the goal of developing early detection methods and improved treatments.