Tyrone Cannon named the Clark L. Hull Professor of Psychology

Tyrone Douglas Cannon, newly named as the Clark L. Hull Professor of Psychology, focuses his research on the interplay between psychological-level phenomena and neurobiological mechanisms as they relate to disturbances of perception, belief, motivation, and emotional processing in people with mental illness, principally schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

Cannon directs the Clinical Neuroscience Laboratory in the Department of Psychology. The primary goals of the laboratory are to elucidate genetic, neural, and behavioral mechanisms underlying psychotic forms of mental illness — principally schizophrenia and bipolar disorder — and to develop effective intervention and prevention strategies targeting these mechanisms. The laboratory’s approaches include structural, functional, and metabolic brain imaging; neurocognitive assessment; and quantitative and molecular genetics. These approaches are applied in the context of twin studies, longitudinal developmental studies, birth cohort studies, and randomized, controlled trials.

A graduate of Dartmouth College, Cannon earned his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Southern California. He began his teaching career at the University of Pennsylvania before serving as the Staglin Family Professor of Major Mental Illness at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA). At UCLA, Cannon was also director of the Staglin Center for the Assessment and Prevention of Prodromal States and the Staglin Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, both based in the Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the Geffen School of Medicine. He joined the Yale faculty in 2012 as a professor of psychology and of psychiatry.

Cannon has published more than 315 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and scholarly monographs. He is the co-editor of two books: “Fetal Neural Development and Adult Schizophrenia” and “Developmental Neuropathology of Schizophrenia.” He serves as editor of the Annual Review of Clinical Psychology and associate editor of Clinical Psychological Science and the American Journal of Psychiatry. Cannon is an editorial consultant for numerous scholarly publications, including The Lancet, JAMA-Psychiatry, Neuron, and PLosOne, among others.

The awards for Cannon’s research and teaching include the Joseph Zubin Award for research in psychopathology from Columbia University and the Distinguished Teaching Award from the Department of Psychology at UCLA, among other honors. Cannon is also an elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.