Prof Christina Wierenga
Professor of Psychiatry, University of California San Diego (UCSD)
Christina Wierenga, Ph.D., is a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine. She is a Fellow of the Division of Clinical Neuropsychology (Division 40) of the American Psychological Association (APA) and a Fellow of the Academy of Eating Disorders. She is also the Co-Director of the UCSD/VA Psychology Internship Training Program. In addition, as Co-Director of Research and Senior Supervising Clinical Psychologist at the UCSD Eating Disorder Center for Treatment and Research, she has been working with adolescents and adults with eating disorders for over a decade. She is an expert in the neurobiology of eating disorders and utilizes neurocognitive and neuroimaging approaches to study brain mechanisms underlying maladaptive behavior in eating disorders, with a focus on corticostriatal and limbic circuitry and associated functions. She has spent the last decade studying reward processing, inhibitory control, interoception, and learning to better characterize their role in altered motivation to eat and symptom expression in anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. She is also heavily involved in treatment development efforts for anorexia nervosa, focused on applying a neurobiological understanding of temperament-based behavior to clinical practice. This has resulted in a new treatment approach, Temperament Based Therapy with Support (TBT-S). She has published over 120 peer-reviewed papers, has mentored over 50 clinical and research trainees, has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIMH, NIDDK), National Eating Disorders Association, and the Department of Veterans Affairs, and has served in leadership roles across multiple organizations, including the Academy of Eating Disorders.