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It began with talking to homeless people on the city streets surrounding his university in Austin. Many of them had schizophrenia, and their jumbled conversations puzzled and intrigued Matthew Avila, an undergraduate psychology student at the University of Texas at the time. “Chatting with these colorful people on the streets, I was fascinated,” explains Avila.

With steadfast interest, Avila completed a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology at UMBC in 2001. He's now in the midst of completing his Ph.D. in the pyschology department’s human services psychology program behavioral medicine track under the mentorship of professor Dr. Stanley Feldstein. Prolific in his accomplishments, Avila has published over thirteen journal articles (eight of which he first-authored), presented at numerous well-known neuroscience research conferences and successfully competed for federal and private research funding. He is the recipient of a National Service Research Award and is supported as a co-investigator by two large federal grants.

Since 2001, a significant portion of Avila's degree work has involved conducting research in a postdoctoral training program at the prestigious Maryland Psychiatric Research Center (MPRC), a center affiliated with the University of Maryland’s School of Medicine. “It’s a unique facility,” explains Avila. “It’s bench to bedside, dedicated to all aspects of treatment and research of schizophrenia. We study schizophrenia from all levels—from molecular genetic to biochemical to psychosocial.”

Under the tutelage of Dr. Gunvant Thaker, Avila has been working within the center’s schizophrenia related disorders program doing “translational” research. “We are trying to map the causal path from genes to behaviors,” Avila explains. Specifically, Avila and others have been working to pinpoint the genomic regions associated with specific “deficits” that characterize schizophrenia, such as sensory processing or memory dysfunctions. Once a candidate gene is isolated, “we try to connect the dots,” says Avila. “We want to know what the genes code for, where it is expressed in the brain, how it is related to the observed deficit and how this leads to functional impairments.”

“Almost all schizophrenics are smokers,” relates Avila, referring to the topic of his dissertation, Topography of Smoking in Patients with Schizophrenia. He continues, “While the prevalence of smoking in normal populations is 20%, the prevalence in schizophrenic populations is 88%.” The explanation for this puzzling difference has just recently been uncovered through family studies of schizophrenia-related neurocognitive deficits. Avila explains, “Research has shown that sensory processing deficits in families affected by schizophrenia are related to an abnormal alpha 7 nicotinic receptor subunit gene located on chromosome 15. This subunit plays an important role in receptors that bind nicotine in the brain.” Having found this clear connection with smoking, researchers have further discovered that “if you give nicotine to schizophrenic patients, it temporarily improves sensory processing, as well as other problems such as poor memory.”

Supported by a University of Maryland Other Tobacco Related Diseases Research Grant, part of the Maryland Cigarette Restitution Fund Program, Avila is working hard to discern the causal relationships that exist between the many factors that seem linked to smoking behavior in schizophrenics. “We are conducting a series of behavioral, pharmacological and genetic studies looking at smoking, nicotine, genes and deficits and trying to map the functional relationships that exist between them," says Avila. "We are trying to determine whether the genes cause the cognitive problems, which then lead to smoking and nicotine addiction, or whether the cognitive problems and the smoking behaviors are independently caused by the genes. Or, whether it’s some combination of the two.”

"Schizophrenics are smoking to self-medicate—to regulate their own behavior," explains Avila. "They aren't going to quit. And, because they smoke more, they are more likely to suffer from smoking-related health problems." Avila's research is oriented towards a clinical treatment application. Avila hopes that the results of his dissertation research will facilitate the development of drugs to treat cognitive deficits in this population, and will help in the development of tailored smoking cessation programs. "We'd like to help reduce the poor health outcomes in this vulnerable population," he states.

Once he completes his Ph.D., Avila plans to remain at the MPRC, where he has been offered a faculty position in UMB's School of Medicine's Department of Psychiatry.