Dr. Sabina Berretta began her research training at Institute of Human Physiology, University of Catania, Italy. In 1990, she joined the laboratory directed by Dr. A. M. Graybiel in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, where she worked on neural circuitry linking the motor cortex to basal ganglia. In 1997, Sabina moved to McLean Hospital – Harvard Medical School to work in the laboratory directed by Dr. F. Benes. There she developed an animal model designed to investigate GABAergic abnormalities in schizophrenia and developed her work on human brain tissue.

In 1999, Dr. Berretta became the Director of the Translational Neuroscience Laboratory at McLean Hospital. She and her team conduct investigations on the biology of psychiatric symptoms. Their studies focus on neural circuits involved in emotion processing, testing the overarching hypothesis that coordinated interactions between neuronal and glial cell types, the extracellular matrix and the neurovascular unit are disrupted in these circuits. Her group has published extensively on the role of these brain regions in emotion dysregulation across several brain disorders.

In 2014, Dr. Berretta became the Director of the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center (HBTRC), one of seven NIH NeuroBioBank sites. Her work with the HBTRC aims to make research on nervous system disorders possible. The HBTRC does this by collecting brain donations from persons suffering from neurological, psychiatric and neurodevelopmental conditions and distributing them to investigators across the world.