Kent Kiehl, Ph.D.

Research Interests

Research in my laboratory focuses on the neurobiology of major mental illnesses, with special focus on the spectrum of psychotic disorders and criminal psychopathy. I also have broader interests in primate and cetacean populations. I primarily use non-invasive techniques for measuring brain function, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), event-related potentials (ERPs), magnetoencephalography (MEG), and positron emission tomography (PET). The goal of these studies is to elucidate and characterize the abnormal functional architecture believed to underlie these clinical disorders and to understand how psychological and/or pharmacological treatment modulates these neural processes. Ultimately, the goal of this research is to understand, diagnose, and effectively treat these clinical conditions.

Personal History of Scientific Training

I began my scientific training as an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis. In my first year, I accepted a research assistant position in the UC Davis Hospital Department of Anesthesiology’s research lab. Over the next four years, I was primarily involved with pain research. Specifically, I helped with studies attempting to determine the minimum alveolar concentration (MAC) of an inhalation anesthetic necessary to produce inhibition of a painful stimulus. This was very invasive work, often with long surgical preparations. While I found this work stimulating, my real interest lied in recording and monitoring the animals EEG during these long studies.

In my third year of undergraduate studies, I began to explore other analysis techniques for examining the brain’s electrical activity. I became very interested in studying event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and I volunteered as a research technician for several killer whale ERP studies (Szymanski, Bain, Kiehl, Henry, Pennington & Wong, 1999). This is the largest animal EEG has ever been recorded from -- it sure was difficult to get the electrode cap on them (ERPer joke :-)

Although I was very interested in using noninvasive methods to study brain processes, I wanted to apply these techniques to understanding human cognition, specifically, abnormal human cognition. To this end, I began to study ERP research on psychopathy and schizophrenia. I soon realized that I needed more experience and supervision in abnormal psychology and I began working with Dr. Rick Levenson. Over the course of the next year, we worked on the development of a self-report scale for the assessment of psychopathy in noninstitutional populations (Levenson, Kiehl, & Fitzpatrick, 1995).

While still at UC Davis, I worked in several other research labs as an undergraduate, of note, that of Dr. Ron Mangun, where I was schooled on the intricacies of ERP and PET acquisition and analyses. After 16 months working in Dr. Mangun’s lab, I left to pursue graduate studies in psychology at the University of British Columbia under the supervision of Dr. Robert Hare.

My masters thesis was an ERP study of language processing in criminal psychopaths (Kiehl, Hare, McDonald & Brink, 1999). After I completed my masters, I continued my research activities under the tutelage of Dr. Peter Liddle.

In addition to my ERP work with Dr. Hare (see also Kiehl, Hare, Liddle & McDonald, 1999; Kiehl, Smith, Liddle & Hare, 2000) and more recently Dr. Liddle, I have spent a considerable amount of time working in functional MRI. Much of our fMRI research deals with developing paradigms designed to elucidate the functional and cognitive abnormalities often associated with psychiatric illnesses. The topics of these studies include attentional processes (McDonald, Ward & Kiehl, 1999), language (Kiehl, Liddle, Smith, Mendrek, Forster & Hare, 1999; see also Kiehl, Laurens & Liddle, 2001) emotion and memory (Kiehl, Smith, Hare, Forster,  & Liddle, 2001) and executive function (Kiehl, Liddle & Hopfinger, 2001). Some of our most recent and exciting work has been developing event-related fMRI techniques to study attention, language and executive function (see CV).

Under Dr. Liddle’s supervision, I have become intimately familiar with statistical parametric mapping (SPM) and several other image processing techniques (MR reconstruction, fMRI pulse sequence development, functional connectivity analyses).

For my Ph.D. dissertation I examined affective, cognitive, and language processes in criminal psychopaths using ERPs and fMRI (completed 3/1/00). This work is being written up for publication.

I have also worked on developing a number of custom software programs, including a visual and auditory presentation package (VAPP; in collaboration with Tony Gray, Peter Liddle, Steve Hillyard, Ron Mangun, Steve Luck, and Marty Woldorff), PCI based high resolution EEG acquisition software (Digitize; in collaboration with Arthur Jones and Peter Liddle), functional and effective connectivity analyses package (in collaboration with Adrien Dejardins, Tim Duty, and Peter Liddle) and most recently, path analyses software for examining fMRI data (in collaboration with Adrien Dejardins, Tim Duty, and Peter Liddle).

In addition to my research activities, I also have performed clinical psychological services for the Correctional Services of Canada (CSC). This work primarily involves risk assessments on the mentally ill patients at a maximum security prison in the Vancouver area.

In January of 2001, I accepted a position as Director of the Clinical Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at the Institute of Living (IOL). Academically, I hold an Assistant Clinical Professorship in the Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine.  IOL recently created the Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center. We are currently renovating a beautiful 1877 English Tudor building (Whitehall) that will house a Siemens 3T Allegra MR system, high resolution EEG/ERP system, and more than 15,000 square feet of research space.