Chair, Psychology & Neuroscience, Wesleyan University and Assistant Clinical Professor, Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine

Dr. Matthew Kurtz is currently Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and Behavior at Wesleyan University. He also has appointments as an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine and at the Institute of Living in Hartford, CT.

Matthew received his undergraduate degree in Psychology at Reed College (1989) (Phi Beta Kappa), his doctorate in Psychology and Neuroscience at Princeton University (1995) and post-doctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania with Dr. Raquel Gur. Dr. Kurtz arrived as a psychologist in the Schizophrenia Rehabilitation Program at the Institute of Living and as an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine in 2000 and was promoted to the role of Senior Research Scientist in 2005 at the Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Program and the Schizophrenia Rehabilitation Program.

The focus of Dr. Kurtz’s research program and clinical work is the development and evaluation of novel behavioral approaches for treatment of deficits in attention, memory and problem-solving in people with schizophrenia. The efficacy of these interventions, known collectively as cognitive remediation, are assessed with outcome measures that range across a variety of levels of analysis including fundtional neuroimaging data, standardized neurocognitive probes, clinic-administered mediational measures of functioning, and achieved community function and employment status. More recent work is directed at augmenting evidence-based practices in rehabilitation, such as social-skills training, with novel approaches to cognitive remediation in schizophrenia. Dr. Kurtz is also interested in refining methods for measuring neurocognitive dysfunction in patients with schizophrenia, elucidating the neural substrates underlying impaired neurocognition in this population, and developing remediation strategies for deficits in emotion recognition and other aspects of social cognition.