About the Powers Lab: research on psychosis symptoms to improve diagnosis, risk stratification, and early intervention

Powers Lab at Yale School of Medicine focuses on understanding how symptoms of mental illness, especially psychosis symptoms, emerge so that new diagnosis, risk stratification, and treatments can be developed. The lab combines advanced psychophysics, neuroimaging, and computational modeling with detailed interviewing and phenomenological analysis to study how psychosis symptoms develop. A key aim is to identify processes that lead to the most distressing aspects of psychotic illness and intervene as early as possible to improve patients' clinical trajectories. The research also looks at protective factors in people at clinical high risk of psychosis, including individuals who hear voices but do not seek psychiatric help. Work is connected to the PRIME Psychosis Risk Research Clinic, and the lab uses diverse methods including qualitative analysis, electrophysiology, and functional imaging to support both mechanistic understanding and practical clinical approaches.