Author Archives: samweiss

On June 18–19, 2025, ACCESS Mental Health welcomed ten undergraduate students from local universities to the UNC School of Medicine’s Roper Hall for the inaugural 2025 Psychiatry Careers Pathway Program (PCPP), a two-day immersive experience for undergraduate students to explore psychiatry as a potential career. Throughout the program, students engaged...

Via usual smartphone use following trauma exposure, this study identified language markers associated with patient-reported severity and change in severity for multiple symptoms. Using language markers as a proxy for the status of and changes in specific symptoms supports efficient remote health status monitoring and can provide clinicians with valuable...

Hyperarousal symptoms such as jumpiness and over-alertness are central features of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and are partly explained by hyper-reactivity of the right amygdala, a brain region involved in emotional learning. In the current study, we found that people who showed right amygdala hyper-reactivity shortly after trauma were more...

In a survey of adults with cystic fibrosis attending a large, academic medical center, 32% scored high enough on a standardized screening tool to suggest they probably have obsessive-compulsive disorder. This rate is much higher than the rate in the general population and 2-3 times higher than in other populations...

We developed a Motor Assisted Commutator to Harness Electronics in Tethered Experiments (MACHETE), an open-source device that helps behavioral neuroscientists retain naturalistic behavior during tethered, freely moving experiments in mice. We were particularly interested in freely-moving experiments relevant to studying arousal disorders, including the open field test, splash test, and...

Anxiety disorders arise when the brain’s response to threats become too intense or persists when not needed, leading to maladaptive behaviors and excessive arousal. We found that specialized arousal neurons in a brain region called the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis activate when mice escape an aversive stimulus, offering...

This paper presents SimNorth, an unsupervised deep learning method for organizing non-standard fetal ultrasound images. By learning feature embeddings using a novel contrastive loss and clustering similar anatomical structures, SimNorth outperforms existing methods like Autoencoders, MoCo, and SimCLR in identifying meaningful image groups.

Xylazine, an adulterant increasingly found in the illicit opioid drug supply, enhances the interoceptive (subjective) effects of lower doses of fentanyl in rats. These results in rats align with reports from people who use drugs and may be used to better understand the mechanism of the effects of xylazine on...

Our newest paper suggests frontoparietal theta synchrony as a promising therapeutic target for attention disorders. We show that top-down theta connectivity stabilizes attentional performance in a freely moving behavioral task under high cognitive demand.