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David W. Pittman

Dr Pittman

Dr. David Pittman serves on our treatment team at Garrett Counseling where he provides our counselors with the most up-to-date research in the field of neuroscience and counseling.

David W. Pittman, Ph.D., is a Professor of Psychology at Wofford College. Dr. Pittman earned a B.S. degree in psychology from Wofford College (1994) and an M.S. degree in psychology (1997) and a Ph.D. degree in neuroscience (2001) from the Florida State University. In addition to teaching neuroscience courses such as Biological Psychology, Sensation & Perception, Behavioral Neuroscience, Clinical Neuroscience and Psychopharmacology, Dr. Pittman maintains a productive research laboratory involving solely undergraduate students.

Highlights -
Dr. Pittman’s laboratory examines how taste neural signals are sent from the mouth to the brain and how the sense of taste then affects feeding behavior in both humans and rodent animal models. Currently Dr. Pittman is investigating three lines of research. 1) Understanding how dietary fats produce taste sensations and motivate the consumption of high-fat foods. 2) Exploring how anti-anxiety drugs, such as Valium, may alter taste sensations to increase the palatability of food and thus increase our food consumption when taking those medications. 3) Identifying a new mechanism in the tongue to detect and taste glucose. Dr. Pittman has also developed and supports an elementary school-based intervention to reduce childhood obesity. Boss’ Healthy Buddies is an evidence-based nutrition education resource matched to South Carolina elementary education standards for kindergarten through fourth grade. The Healthy Eating Decisions program is a cost-free, sustainable, and effective program to increase healthy eating during school lunch service.