Overview~
I am the Co-Founder and CEO of Dragonfly Mental Health, a nonprofit dedicated to cultivating excellent mental health among academics worldwide. I am also a research scientist at Geisinger Health working on biomedical informatics projects aimed at improving healthcare outcomes following surgery and better understanding patient response to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). I serve as the Chair of the American Medical Informatics Association Mental Health Informatics Working Group, and enjoy consulting for biomedical technology companies that focus on using technology to advance mental health care.
I am dedicated to (1) understanding the underlying biology of mental illness through research, and (2) dismantling the stigma against these illnesses through advocacy, education, and systemic change.
Research & Education Details~
2017-2020: NIMH T32 Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Psychiatric Epidemiology Training Program in the Department of Mental Health in the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. I used Electronic Health Records and genetic data to study depression and ECT under the mentorship of Peter Zandi.
2015-2017: Computational Biology Postdoctoral Fellowship at Geisinger Health advised by Sharon Larson and Marylyn Ritchie in the Department of Epidemiology and Health Services Research and the Biomedical Translational Informatics Institute working on a broad range of clinical translational topics including brain cancer single cell biology, Electronic Health Records medical informatics, mental health, integrative medicine, and genomics.
2009-2015: PhD graduate program in Molecular and Cell Biology, working jointly in the labs of Michael Eisen and Ellen Robey at the University of California, Berkeley. I received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to support my study of the brain parasite, Toxoplasma gondii. The main goal for my graduate studies was to understand at the molecular level how this parasite causes mice to lose their fear of cats.
2003-2009: I spent 4 years in a Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics research lab as an undergraduate research assistant at the University of Arizona. My freshman year I joined Matthew Cordes‘ Protein Evolution lab where we studied the molecular details of protein structure and stability. I worked collaboratively and independently on a number of projects resulting in contributions to 4 peer-reviewed academic publications. Following my years in the Cordes lab, I explored the field of neuropsychopharmacology and was hired as a Research Specialist by Amelia Gallitano. I spent one year leading projects investigating mouse models of schizophrenia and stress-induced thymic involution at the Phoenix campus of University of Arizona’s Medical School.