Position
Professor, Vice Chair for Research, Department of Psychiatry, College of Medicine
Contact
Email: awacheson@uams.edu
Research Experience
Ashley Acheson, Ph.D., professor and vice chair for research for the UAMS Department of Psychiatry in the College of Medicine, is a behavioral neuroscientist who joined the UAMS in October 2016.
Acheson attended the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater for his undergraduate education, receiving bachelor’s degree in psychology with a minor in biology. He completed his doctoral studies at the University at Buffalo – The State University of New York (SUNY) where he completed his Ph.D. in behavioral neuroscience. Later, he completed his postdoctoral training at the University of Chicago and the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UTHSCSA), supported by T32 fellowships from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute of Mental Health..
In 2007, he joined the faculty at the UTSCSA Department of Psychiatry, later becoming an associate professor. At UTSCSA, he completed a KL2 Research Career Development Scholar Program and developed a research program examining behavioral and neurobiological risk factors for alcohol and other drug addictions that was funded by over $5 million in NIH grants.
Since joining UAMS, Acheson has been awarded over $13 million in NIH grants. His ongoing research includes the Family Health Patterns Project, a long-running study aimed at identifying behavioral and biological factors underlying risk for addictions. He also is a principal investigator on the HEALthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) Study, the largest ever study of child brain development. The HBCD Study will offer unprecedented opportunities to study how early life influences promote risk and resilience for addictions and other psychopathology. He hopes that his work will lead to improved addiction prevention and early intervention strategies.
Research Interests
Acheson employs multidisciplinary approaches to investigate how family history and early life experiences influences brain and behavioral development in childhood and early adulthood, with a focus on mechanisms contributing to risk for problem substance use. Below are his current research projects.
Family Health Patterns (FHP) Project (R01AA012207)
The FHP Project is a long-running study aimed at characterizing behavioral and biological factors associated with family histories of alcoholism and early life adversity exposure. Activities during the current funding period are focused on examining how family histories of alcoholism and early life adversity affect immune regulation and frontal white matter myelination and health. Ultimately this work hopes to better inform how family history and early life experience influence risk for problem alcohol and other drug use.
HEALthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) Study (U01DA055352)
The Arkansas Children’s Research Institute and UAMS are serving as one of 25 data collection sites around the United Sates for the HEALthy Brain and Child Development study, the largest ever study of child brain development. HEALthy Brain and Child Development will follow 7,500 children from the prenatal period to at least ages 9-10. The study will investigate how things like prenatal opioid and other drug exposure, nutrition and early life environment influences influence risk for early substance use, mental disorders, and other behavioral and developmental problems. It will also identify resilience factors that may mitigate some of these adverse outcomes. For more information, please see https://hbcdstudy.org.
Recent Publications
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=mjf-UHEAAAAJ&hl=en