Dr. Pizzagalli received his M.A. (1995) and Ph.D. (1998) from the University of Zurich, Switzerland and did post-doctoral work at University of Wisconsin, Madison. From 2002-2010 he was a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, where he served as the John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Sciences. In 2010, he was recruited to McLean Hospital to serve as the Founding Director of the Center for Depression, Anxiety and Stress Research, as well as the Director of the McLean Imaging Center. Until 12/2024, Dr. Pizzagalli was a Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Since 2024, he is also a Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford, UK. In 2025, he joined the University of California at Irvine as the Founding Director of the Noel Drury, M.D. Institute for Translational Depression Discoveries, a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior and the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, and the Noel Drury MD Endowed Chair. He is also the Center Director for a Silvio O. Conte Center for Basic Translational Mental Health Research focused on the neurobiology of and novel treatment targets for depression.

Dr. Pizzagalli has made important contributions to our understanding of psychological, cognitive, computational and neural mechanisms implicated in depression and anhedonia (lack of reactivity to pleasurable stimuli). Specifically, taking a cognitive neuroscience approach, and recently an integration across species (rodents, non-human primates, humans), Dr. Pizzagalli’s laboratory has developed (a) an integrated model of anhedonia that emphasizes stress-induced dysregulation of mesolimbic pathways in the emergence of this cardinal symptom of depression; and (b) biomarkers associated with disease heterogeneity and treatment response. This work has integrated innovative laboratory-based measures of depressive phenotypes (e.g., cognitive control deficits, reinforcement learning), electrophysiology, functional and structural neuroimaging, molecular imaging and, more recently, rodent models of depression. By focusing on precise endophenotypes characterized by reliable cognitive and biobehavioral markers, this line of research is overcoming limitations of a psychiatric nosology restricted to descriptive characteristics and lays the foundations for personalized treatments.