Dr. Peter Zhukovsky is a scientist with the Brain Health Imaging Centre, and the Krembil Center for Neuroinformatics (KCNI) at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH).
He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge, UK, in Psychology. After completing his degree, he moved to Toronto where he did his first postdoc at CAMH (with Dr. Voineskos) on a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Postdoctoral Fellowship with work focused on transdiagnostic mechanisms of psychopathology in mood and anxiety disorders, investigating the neurobiology of psychiatric disorders and their links to neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. Using multi-scale imaging-genetics methods in his work at CAMH, Dr. Zhukovsky uncovered novel, robust brain-cognition associations in late-life depression and prodromal Alzheimer’s disease. In a second postdoctoral fellowship at McLean Hospital (Harvard Medical School, with Dr Pizzagalli), Dr Zhukovsky has expanded his use of imaging-genetics methods in transdiagnostic investigations of the stress mechanisms in major depression. He also helped lead a prospective biomarker-guided clinical trial of major depression and has since led investigations into robust and generalizable biomarkers predicting treatment response in major depression. His work has been funded by NIH and CIHR.
AREAS OF RESEARCH
Dr. Zhukovsky’s general research area focuses on clinical neuroscience of psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases (Major Depression, Anxiety, Stress-related disorders, Drug Use Disorders, Alzheimer’s and other dementias). A focus on using novel biostatistical methods in neuroimaging, cognitive neuroscience, genetics, blood biochemistry, and machine learning aims to advance our understanding of biomarkers and risk factors defining clinical trajectories of psychiatric symptoms and cognitive changes.
Current research (supported by NIMH) aims to identify biomarkers of depression treatment response in late-life treatment-resistant geriatric depression. Other research includes RDoC-inspired investigation of the role of the endocannabinoid system in transdiagnostic dimensions of psychopathology, and investigation of cognitive resilience and gray and white matter microstructure in late-life depression. Further, in collaboration with KCNI, Dr Zhukovsky has access to several population level datasets such as UK Biobank, All Of Us, and Canadian Longitudinal Study of Aging, with PHeWAS and GWAS investigations of genomic data in these samples.
PUBLICATIONS
View Dr. Zhukovsky's publications on PubMed.