Joao L. de Quevedo, MD, PhD

Biography

João Luciano de Quevedo, MD, PhD, is professor and vice chair of Faculty Development and Outreach in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. He specializes in mood disorders (major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder). As a clinician, de Quevedo’s area of expertise is with treatment-resistant patients. He works to manage complex differential diagnosis and develop personalized treatment strategies. As a researcher, he has been making important contributions to understanding the pathophysiology of these diseases as well developing experimental treatments that can be used in the clinic in the near future. He is both the Director of the Translational Psychiatry Program and the Treatment-Resistant Mood Disorders Program, part of the Center of Excellence on Mood Disorders.

He completed his medical degree in 1998, residency training in psychiatry in 2000, fellowship in psychopharmacology in 2001, and PhD in Biological Sciences (Biochemistry) in 2002 – all from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil. de Quevedo has been involved in research since 1994. As a medical student, he was a research fellow in the laboratory of Professor Ivan A. Izquierdo, the most important scientist in Brazil at that time. In 1996, he published his first research paper focused on the neurobiology of learning and memory, an area to which he devoted himself until shortly after the completion of his PhD. Over the past years, he has gradually shifted his research interest to the neurobiology of psychiatric disorders, particularly mood disorders.