Dr. Derin Cobia is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Brigham Young University and Associate Director of the BYU MRI Research Facility. He completed his undergraduate degree in Psychology at Brigham Young University, and then went on to earn his PhD in clinical psychology, specializing in neuropsychology, at St. Louis University. He spent his clinical internship year in the neuropsychology track at West Virginia University’s School of Medicine, before moving to Chicago for a postdoctoral position at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. While there he completed a two-year clinical neuropsychology fellowship at the Mesulam Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease Center, and was also an NIH NRSA-funded postdoctoral research fellow conducting imaging studies in the neurobiological mechanisms of schizophrenia in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. He stayed at Northwestern for another 5 years after postdoc as an Assistant Professor, staff neuropsychologist, and Associate Director of the Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program.
Currently Dr. Cobia directs the Brain Imaging and Behavior Lab at BYU, which is focused on the implementation of computational anatomy tools to study neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases, particularly schizophrenia. His interests include understanding the heterogeneity that exists in schizophrenia by taking a cognitive neuroscience perspective, which involves linking cognitive and neurobiological characteristics to important clinical dimensions of the illness.