Gabriella Gobbi: Embracing psychiatry from bench to bedside
Brain medicine : March 17, 2026 Gabriella Gobbi
Dr. Gabriella Gobbi is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist whose research spans three interconnected areas. Her laboratory established that adolescent cannabis exposure increases vulnerability to depression in animal models and human cohorts, work that informed Quebec's policy raising the legal cannabis age and banning advertising. She discovered and patented novel selective agonists of melatonin MT1 and MT2 receptors, elucidating the MT2 receptor's role in restorative sleep and neuropathic pain, and is advancing a first-in-class MT2-selective partial agonist. She characterized the anxiolytic and prosocial effects of LSD in preclinical models, identifying mTORC1 signaling, and is extending this to psilocybin, DMT, and 5-MeO-DMT while initiating clinical studies to identify biomarkers of psychedelic action. She was the first woman elected President of the Collegium Internationale of Neuropsychopharmacology.