Breno Diniz, MD, PhD, joined the faculty of WashU Medicine Department of Psychiatry on April 1, 2026, as professor of psychiatry in the Division of Clinical Neuroscience and Behavioral Health. Dr. Diniz is a geriatric psychiatrist who brings cutting-edge translational research expertise in using new multi-omic biomarkers of brain aging and neuropsychiatric disorders to understand and manage mental illness from the lens of aging biology.
Dr. Diniz earned his MD at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil and his PhD with a focus on the neurobiology of late-life depression and Alzheimer’s disease from the University of Sao Paulo in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He comes to WashU Medicine from the UConn Center on Aging & Department of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine at the University of Connecticut Health Center, where he was an associate professor. For over a decade, Dr. Diniz has pioneered biomarker research at the intersection of aging and neuropsychiatric disorders. For example, Dr. Diniz’s lab was the first to develop and optimize a biomarker-based index as a proxy of cellular senescence burden (the SASP index) and its association with major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, and mild cognitive impairment in older adults. Diniz has been continuously funded by the NIH since 2017, and has over 170 publications.
He looks forward to collaborating with faculty, staff, and trainees to advance the understanding of brain health across the lifespan by discovering novel biomarkers that reveal how aging influences the development of neuropsychiatric disorders and how mental illness affects aging biology.
Email: diniz@wustl.edu
Office: Taylor Avenue Building