Nicola Riccardo Polizzotto, MD

Biography

Nicola Riccardo Polizzotto, MD, Associate Professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, is one of the faculty psychiatrists at UTHealth Harris County Psychiatric Center (HCPC). His interests include schizophrenia, dissociation and neurophysiology, with emphasis on human brain imaging (EEG, fMRI) and non-invasive stimulation methods (TMS, tDCS, tACS).

Polizzotto completed his medical education at the University of Pisa in Italy and residency in psychiatry and psychotherapy at the University of Siena. His clinical interests are psychotic and dissociative disorders. Through his postdoctoral work he moved to a translational formulation of his hypothesis, focusing on synchronization and integrative processes in the brain. During his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh, he gained further theoretical and experimental expertise, exploiting electro-physiological approaches to the study of neural synchrony disturbances in schizophrenia and development.

He has extensive experience of EEG and fMRI methods, including development of original analytical approaches and combination with non-invasive brain stimulation approaches. He is currently working with the Clinical Cognitive Neuroscience Lab on advancing the understanding of cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying cognitive control and their impairments in serious mental illness such as schizophrenia.

He is a reviewer for several international journals and he has experience and an ongoing role in undergraduate and graduate education. This includes the involvement as referring expert for graduate dissertations for psychiatry, neurology, bioengineering, and mathematics.