Research Overview
Dr. JoAnn Difede is currently the Principal Investigator of a treatment development award (R21) to develop early interventions to treat acute Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) following burn injury, and more recently terrorism. She is also collaborating with Dr. Hunter Hoffman on the use of Virtual Reality in the treatment of PTSD following the World Trade Center attack. She is the site Principal Investigator of a RAPID award to Charles Marmar, M.D., of UCSF, to test a brief Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy intervention of PTSD in disaster relief workers after 9-11-01. She has supervised two longitudinal studies of PTSD in burn patients and conducted several hundred assessments of acute and chronic PTSD. She completed, as the principal investigator, an National Institute of Mental Health funded study on Acute Stress Disorder in burn patients.
