UCSD Profiles

Biography

Dr. Bischoff-Grethe received her Ph.D. in Computer Science with a focus upon Computational Neurobiology from the University of Southern California in 1998. She was a postdoctoral fellow and Assistant Project Scientist at UCSD before joining the UCSD faculty. She is currently an Associate Adjunct Professor in the Department of Psychiatry. Dr. Bischoff-Grethe is particularly interested in the brain's response to reward and punishment and how it relates to cognitive processing. Her research focuses upon brain function in adolescents and adults with eating disorders or histories of substance use using functional MRI, DTI, and other morphometric methods.

Research Interests

Dr. Bischoff-Grethe’s primary interest is reward and decision-making processing in both healthy and clinical populations using functional MRI. Currently, she leads studies examining how decision-making and probabilistic learning are altered due to the individual and combined effects of recent methamphetamine dependence and HIV infection. She also plays a prominent role in studies examining how frontostriatal processing is altered in individuals with an eating disorder. Given that eating disorders most often manifest during adolescence, a period of profound neurodevelopmental change in reward and cognitive control processes, a growing part of her research has emphasized the key differences in these processes in children and adolescents with an eating disorder. More recently, she has expanded her work to include both structural and functional connectivity analyses.

Clinical and Teaching Focus

Dr. Bischoff-Grethe’s clinical interests involve using neuroimaging to identify the biological and cognitive processes underlying psychopathology. The identification of the neurophenotypes associated with clinical symptoms will aid in the development of more effective treatments.