Charles Lewis
University of Minnesota, MN·Neuroscience·Early-career
Suicide is the second leading cause of death among adolescents, and rates of suicidal behavior are rising, yet very little is known about what happens in the brain to push a young person from thinking about suicide to acting on it. This project focuses on one candidate mechanism: negative urgency, the tendency to act rashly when feeling strong negative emotion.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
adolescent suicidal behavior
suicidality
negative urgency
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- Test whether dysregulated cortical inhibition, the damping of circuit activity by cortical interneurons, is associated with negative urgency, the tendency to act rashly under negative emotion, in depressed adolescents.
- Determine whether cortical inhibition in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is deficient in depressed adolescents with suicidal behavior compared with depressed adolescents who have suicidal ideation only, using TMS paired with EEG.
- Follow 40 adolescents with suicidal ideation and 40 with suicidal behavior longitudinally to test whether inhibition deficits track changes in negative urgency and the emergence of new suicidal behavior.
More about the research
Negative urgency is elevated in youth with suicidal behavior, and it has been tied to weak restraint of emotion-processing brain circuits by the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), a region involved in self-control. How that restraint fails is unclear.
Why it matters
Treatments aimed specifically at adolescent suicidal behavior are lacking, in part because its brain basis is unknown. Identifying a measurable marker of weak prefrontal inhibition linked to acting rashly under negative emotion could help clinicians spot which depressed teens with suicidal thoughts are most likely to act, and could point toward non-invasive brain stimulation treatments that target this circuit.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Zafiris Daskalakis
University of California-San Diego, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Compare standard, clustered and sham maintenance rTMS over six months in 75 adults with treatment-resistant depression, testing which best sustains connectivity between the DLPFC and SGC measured by TMS-EEG.
John Westbrook
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Neuroscience·Early-career
Test whether the balance of excitatory and inhibitory cortical signaling sets how close the brain operates to a critical state, by combining scalp EEG recordings with transcranial magnetic stimulation in human participants.
Alexandria Zakrzewski
Kansas State University, KS·Psychology
Establish a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and repetitive TMS suite combined with EEG, enabling virtual-lesion and neuromodulation experiments that causally test cognitive and neural plasticity.
The school
University of Minnesota: 88 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 722 research doctorates a year.
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