Bio
 

Originally from Ohio, USA, Dr. Waltz received his Bachelor’s degree from Yale University and his Master’s and PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, in Psychology/Cognitive Neuroscience. After conducting postdoctoral research at the Max- Planck-Institute for Brain Research, in Frankfurt, Germany, Dr. Waltz took a position at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, in the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where he has been for 17 years.
His NIH-funded work has primarily involved behavioral and neuroimaging studies of learning and decision making, with an eye toward better understanding the positive and negative symptoms of psychotic illness.
Frequently employing hypothesis-driven computational models  for the analysis of behavioral data, his research has sought to isolate the contributions of specific subprocesses of reinforcement learning and decision making to schizophrenia symptoms.
In recent years, Dr. Waltz’s work has increasingly focused on investigating
psychological and neural mechanisms of attenuated symptoms in adolescents and young adults at clinical high-risk (CHR) for psychotic illness, as well as the question of whether behavioral and neural signals related to feedback-processing and decision making may serve as biomarkers for predicting functional and clinical outcomes in CHR youth.