Sophia Vinogradov, MD

Sophia Vinogradov, M.D. is Vice Chair, Department of Psychiatry and Professor of Psychiatry in Residence at UCSF. She is Associate Chief of Staff; Chief of Mental Health Service, at the San Francisco VA Medical Center. She is also Scientific Co-Director of the Prodrome Assessment, Research, and Treatment program at Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute, University of California, San Francisco.

She received her M.D. from Wayne State University School of Medicine, obtained her psychiatry residency training at Stanford University School of Medicine, where she served as Chief Resident, and completed a Psychiatric Neurosciences Research Fellowship at the Palo Alto VA Medical Center and Stanford University.

Clinical Expertise:
Psychopharmacologic treatment of serious mental disorders. Diagnosis and treatment of psychotic disorders. Application of principles of cognitive and neuroscience to understanding of clinical disorders.

Educational Expertise:
Brain, Mind, and Behavior—integrated neuroscience/neurology/psychiatry course for medical students; fundamentals of cognitive neuroscience as applied to human psychopathology and clinical psychopharmacology.

Research Areas:
Dr. Vinogradov directs a translational clinical neuroscience laboratory that focuses on cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia. In collaboration with basic neuroscientist, Michael Merzenich, Ph.D., she studies neuroscience-guided computerized cognitive training exercises for patients with schizophrenia that aim to drive enduring plastic changes in cortical processing. Dr. Vinogradov uses MEG and fMRI methods to probe the brain changes in both early sensory processing and higher-order cognitive operations in subjects who undergo this cognitive training. She is also examining changes in serum biomarkers (BDNF, D-serine) as a response to training. More recently, Dr. Vinogradov has begun to apply these methods to the study of adolescents who are prodromal for schizophrenia and young adults in early psychosis, with the goal of delaying or preventing the onset of a deteriorating psychiatric illness.