Board-certified child and adolescent psychiatrist with a UC San Diego MD (1996), a UCSD doctorate in molecular pathology, and combined psychiatry and child-and-adolescent psychiatry training at Stanford, Dr. Tony T. Yang built one of the foundational functional-MRI research programs investigating neural correlates of pediatric major depressive disorder. His NIMH R01-funded YANG Lab work has documented amygdala hyperactivation, default-mode-network hyperconnectivity, and white-matter frontolimbic disconnectivity in depressed adolescents — including those whose mood symptoms intersect with metabolic, growth, or pubertal-development issues co-managed alongside subspecialty teams such as Children's Healthcare Pediatric Endocrinology. He has additional grant support from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, the Klingenstein Third Generation Foundation, and the National Institute of Mental Health. Adolescents whose first depression screening occurs in a pediatric primary-care office such as Nicole M. Hibbs, MD - Children's Healthcare Medical Group represent the typical referral pathway into the kind of treatment-resistant cases his program targets. His published work also includes longitudinal studies of psychiatric outcomes after pediatric traumatic brain injury and a translational treatment program (TARA) blending mindfulness, resilience, and action-skills training for depressed teens. The most demanding referrals routed to his program are adolescents with treatment-resistant depression, suicidality, and a history of mild TBI requiring imaging-informed differential workup before any medication or therapy escalation.