Psychiatry Resident Receives Prestigious Honor from NIH

It was clearly the right decision. This summer, Iacobucci was notified by the National Institute of Mental Health that he was selected to receive its prestigious 2025 NIMH Outstanding Resident Award.

“The Jacobs School is thrilled that the NIMH has awarded this exceptional, national honor to Dr. Iacobucci,” says Allison Brashear, MD, MBA, vice president for health sciences and dean of the Jacobs School. “His parallel achievements as an accomplished researcher probing the origins of mental health and as a compassionate clinician exemplify what it means to get the most out of the residency experience. We could not be more proud.”

A general psychiatry resident and research assistant professor in biochemistry in the Jacobs School, he is one of just 12 residents nationwide chosen for this honor. He will attend an awards program next month at the National Institutes of Health, where he will present an overview of his research and meet with NIMH leadership and researchers.

His interest in clinical care began while doing doctoral work in the laboratory of Gabriela K. Popescu, PhD, professor of biochemistry in the Jacobs School. When he mentioned he was considering medical school, she connected him with a psychiatrist colleague he could shadow.

Iacobucci remembers the first psychiatric patient he saw. “She was an adolescent and very shy,” he says. “She wouldn’t make eye contact. But she would interact with you if you colored with her and did artwork with her. It was interesting to see that by adapting your approach, you could bring her out of her shell. I think at that point I was hooked.”

He began the MD program in the Jacobs School in 2019. And in his fourth year, as all medical students do, he began looking at residency programs. With his strong background in research, Iacobucci was determined to find a psychiatry residency that blended research with patient care.

“I interviewed at other psychiatry research-track resident programs at very well-funded, prestigious institutions,” he says. “But when I talked to their residents and asked about their clinical interests, they all said they were focused entirely on research. And I thought, ‘well, what was all that clinical training for?’”

So Iacobucci started looking at the Jacobs School’s psychiatry residency for its strong, high-volume clinical program and emphasis on psychotherapy. When they learned of his interests, the program director and faculty members worked with Iacobucci to tailor a residency program for him that combines research with clinical care.

“What I appreciate most is how understanding and flexible the department has been in developing a program that helps me bolster my ability to be a good clinician while allowing me to develop my own unique vision as to what my research program will be,” he says.

For Iacobucci, that means taking advantage of the advances in personalized medicine, a result of the advances in human genetics, which have dramatically improved treatments from oncology to nephrology.

“But that same framework has been much harder to apply in mental and behavioral health,” he says. “There’s a large group of individuals with depression who don’t respond to treatment who are considered ‘treatment-resistant.’ I keep questioning that concept. Is it that the patient is treatment-resistant or are we just not giving them the right treatment? Can we understand the biological basis of treatment resistance?”

Mental health conditions like depression, anxiety and trauma are defined based on clusters of clinical observations.

“We say that if you meet a certain number of them, you have depression,” Iacobucci explains, “but it doesn’t really take into account the fact that if you take a hundred people with depression, they can look entirely different from one another. In fact, there are as many as 227 different combinations of symptoms that will meet criteria for major depressive disorder. There’s an underlying biological heterogeneity that leads to this clinical syndrome called depression but there’s no good way to triage them to find which treatment will work better for this person’s biotype of depression.”

Iacobucci is conducting a pilot study collecting preliminary data to determine whether cognitive flexibility — the ability to shift from one way of thinking to another — can help predict medication treatment outcomes for patients with depression and anxiety.

“Individuals struggling with depression tend to be very rigid and fixed in negative thought processes that are hard to shift out of,” says Iacobucci. His study aims to determining whether differences in thought patterns could predict whether someone will respond to a particular treatment. For example, will they respond better to treatment if they can more easily shift their thought patterns?

 “If we find that certain phenotypes are predictive of treatment response, the next question is, what is their biology?” he asks. “If it’s measurable, then it could lend itself to be modeled in the lab so we can understand the underlying biology of that behavior, perhaps opening the door to new types of interventions to target that phenotype.”

Questioning conventions seems to drive much of what Iacobucci does. A recent paper he published with UB colleagues explores biases among clinicians that delay the diagnosis and treatment of anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, the condition explored in the bestselling book and movie “Brain on Fire.” People with this rare, autoimmune brain disorder often present with psychosis, so they are incorrectly treated with antipsychotic medications. The paper identified common biases, such as confirmation bias and overconfidence, that can affect medical decision-making, especially in emergency settings.

“Clinicians have biases that hinder properly diagnosing organic brain diseases,” says Iacobucci.