Daphne J. Holt, MD, PhD received her MD and PhD from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. She then went on to complete her clinical training at the MGH/McLean Psychiatry Residency Program and a fellowship in clinical research and neuroimaging at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. She has been a faculty member of the MGH Psychiatry Department since 2004, and is also both faculty at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. In addition to running her lab, she also serves as the Co-Director of the MGH Schizophrenia Clinical and Research Program (SCRP) and the Director of the Resilience and Prevention Program (RAPP), a clinical service focused on developing interventions to increase resilience of youth with risk factors for developing psychiatric illnesses.
Jacqueline A. Clauss, MD, PhD received her MD and her PhD from the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. She is completing her adult psychiatry training at MGH/McLean and will next complete a fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry at MGH/McLean. Her PhD research focused on the neural basis of inhibited temperament and differences in brain activation during anticipation of social stimuli. Her current research interests are in using neuroimaging and biological markers to understand the basis of risk and resilience for psychiatric disorders.
Zahra (Mona) Nasiriavanaki, MD received her medical degree from Shahid Beheshti University in Iran. She previously did research at the Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM), where she investigated the neural correlates of decision making in reward and punishment conditions using structural brain MRI. Her current research includes studying the peri-personal space in healthy, at-risk, and psychotic patients using functional brain MRI.
Louis Vinke, PhD received his doctorate in Computational Neuroscience from Boston University. His PhD research focused on how visuocortical activity varies across relative and absolute feature dimensions, and employing adaptation as a tool to measure complex population response functions. Currently, he is studying how non-verbal processes important for social communication and motivation differ between clinical and healthy populations, how these processes are supported by basic visual processing, and whether various functional neuroimaging measures can serve as objective markers of these deficits, while also contributing to a systems-level understanding of social behavior.
Clinical Research Coordinators
Rachel Sussman, BS, received her dual degrees in Neuroscience and Psychology from Brandeis University in 2021 where she researched multisensory time perception and decision-making. Her senior thesis analyzed how time pressure, stress, negative affect, and test anxiety impact executive functioning. At MGH, she studies personal space in individuals with and without psychotic disorders using virtual reality.
McKain Williams, BS received his degree in Neuroscience with a minor in Spanish from Michigan State University in 2020. As an undergraduate, McKain studied sensory, behavioral, and brain morphology differences in the Threespine Stickleback fish. After graduating, he worked in two labs at Michigan State – studying the effects that social media use has on mental health, and using dMRI to research how various physiological and lifestyle risk factors contribute to structural and functional changes in the brain during normal aging and in dementia. At MGH, McKain is coordinating a study using neuroimaging to identify potential latent biomarkers for psychosis in women that have suffered episodes of postpartum psychosis.
Daniel S. Johnson, BS received his degree in Psychology from Northeastern University with minors in Behavioral Neuroscience and Theatre in 2020. As part of his degree, Daniel completed a co-op in the CARE lab at McLean Hospital where he studied urgency, cognitive bias, and anhedonia. His current work at MGH focuses on studying biopsychosocial factors related to loneliness and Isolation in those with psychotic disorders.
Elizabeth S. Eberlin, MA received her graduate degree in Psychology from Boston University in 2022 and received her BS in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2019, where she also emphasized a study of math and art. Elizabeth’s MA capstone project explored whether aspects of cognitive functioning could predict work and school outcomes one year later for first episode psychosis populations. In the time between degrees, Elizabeth first worked as a manager for a small tea factory, and then as a Mental Health Specialist on the Schizophrenia/Bipolar Disorders inpatient unit at McLean Hospital. At MGH, Elizabeth coordinates a study assessing the treatment fidelity of first episode psychosis intervention services offered by numerous clinics across Massachusetts. Additionally, she coordinates two studies exploring the utility of novel technologies - a wearable device to measure personal space in-vivo and an artificial intelligence-enabled assessment of mental health in healthcare workers.
Lauren Lindman, BA received her degree in Psychology from Brandeis University with minors in Philosophy and Religious Studies in 2022. She completed an honors thesis examining the developmental antecedents and facets of psychopathy in a sample of juveniles who have sexually offended. At MGH, she coordinates multiple longitudinal studies examining trans-diagnostic risk factors for psychopathology and the effects of psychosocial interventions on sub-clinical depressive and psychotic symptoms and functional connectivity of brain regions involved in emotion regulation among adult and adolescent populations.
Katherine Dokholyan, BS received her degree in Cognitive Science from Brown University in 2022. As an undergraduate, Katherine was interested in the specific impacts of childhood adversity on adult psychopathology. She studied the mechanisms of risk for stress-related disorders through measures such as exposures and phenotypes related to childhood trauma. At MGH, she is coordinating a study that uses virtual reality to investigate personal space in individuals with and without psychotic disorders.
Nicole DeTore, PhD. received her degree in clinical psychology at Alliant University, and completed her APA internship at the UCSD and the San Diego VA. She completed a three year research fellowship at Boston University focusing on psychosis related research. She has additionally worked as a researcher and clinician at UCLA, Harbor UCLA, Drexel University, and now as an Instructor in the Schizophrenia Clinical and Research Program at MGH Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School. Her research focuses on first episode psychosis, schizophrenia, cognition, psychosocial outcomes, severe mental illnesses.
Tracy Barbour, MD received her medical degree from Wayne State University School of Medicine and completed her residency at the MGH/McLean Adult Psychiatry Residency Program. She practices as a clinician in addition to performing research, and her research interests include studying patients in their first episode of psychosis and at-risk populations and using brain imaging to examine early markers of vulnerability.
Drew Coman, PhD. is a Clinical Psychologist in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and Instructor at Harvard Medical School. He is licensed as a Clinical Psychologist and Health Services Provider in the state of Massachusetts. Dr. Coman received his undergraduate degree with Departmental Honors in Psychology and graduate degree in Child Clinical Psychology at the University of Miami. He completed his internship and post doctoral fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. His research and clinical interests has comprised a broad range of work within the field of autism spectrum disorders (ASD), psychosis spectrum conditions, and the comorbidities that span across neuropsychiatric conditions. Most recently, Dr. Coman has been developing a line of research investigating phenotypic traits (e.g., social cognition impairments, sensory abnormalities) that cut across ASD and schizophrenia given the overlapping genotypic and phenotypic factors within these conditions.
Gwang-Won Kim, PhD received his PhD from Chomman National University in South Korea. He previously did research at the Adanced Institute of Aging Science, where his research focused on the development of diagnostic biomarkers and therapeutic mechanisms for Alzheimer’s disease. His research interests include the development of new techniques in MR-related fields and their applications to in vivo and in vitro MR studies of biological systems, as well as the translational study of a combination of fMRI, MRS, DTI and morpho-volumetry in patients with psychiatric disorders.
Roger Tootell, PhD, Associate Professor of Radiology, HMS, is an internationally recognized authority on the function and organization of the primate visual system. In addition, he was an early pioneer and developer of functional MRI methods. His previous work has investigated a wide range of functions of the visual system, including visual attention and motion perception, which are two functions of interest relevant to this lab’s studies of the neural basis of personal space. He and Dr. Holt have been collaborating since 2009, focusing on the roles of lower-level features, attention/motion, and emotional learning in face processing in healthy subjects and in psychosis.
Alumni, Collaborators, & Associated Programs
Alumni
Emily A. Boeke, BS - PhD student in Cognition & Perception, New York University
Brittany S. Cassidy, PhD - Post-Doctoral Fellow, Indiana University
Garth Coombs III, BS - PhD student in Cognition, Brain, & Behavior, Harvard University
Stephanie N. DeCross, BA - PhD student in Clinical Psychology, Harvard University
Jessica Mow, BA - PhD student in Clinical Psychology, Boston University
Logan Leathem, BA, BS - PhD student in Clinical Psychology, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA)
Olga Terechina, MD - Psychiatry Resident, Berkshire Medical Center
Lauri Tuominen, MD PhD - Assistant Professor, University of Ottawa, The Royal Ottawa Institute for Mental Health Research
Richard Vettermann - MD student, Technical University Dresden, Germany
Maeve Ward, BA - MD student, Sidney Kimmel Medical College
Rick P. F. Wolthusen - MD student, Technical University Dresden, Germany; Co-founder, On the Move eV
Yushan (Wisteria) Deng, BA - PhD student in Clinical Psychology, Yale University
Amritha Harikumar, MA - PhD student in Clinical Neuropsychology/Cognitive Neuroscience, Georgia State University
Caroline Kale, BA - MSW student, New York University (NYU)
Samantha Hines, BA - MA student, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Sarah Zapetis, BS - PhD student in Clinical Psychology, University of Southern California
Yolanda I. Whitaker, BS - Mount Sinai Hospital
Jordan Zimmerman, BS - PhD student in Clinical Psychology, Harvard University
Clayton Jeffrey, BS - MS student, McGill University
Collaborators
Randy L. Buckner, PhD
Benjamin K. Brent, MD, MS
Corinne Cather, PhD
Bradford C. Dickerson, MD
Amy H. Farabaugh, PhD
Maurizio Fava, MD
Oliver Freudenreich, MD
Newfei Ho, PhD
Gina R. Kuperberg, MD
Hesheng Liu, PhD
Joseph Mandeville, PhD
Mohammed R. Milad, PhD
Maren B. Nyer, PhD
Tracey Petryshen, PhD
Joshua L. Roffman, MD, MMSc
Bruce R. Rosen, MD, PhD
Benjamin G. Shapero, PhD
Martha E. Shenton, PhD
Associated Programs
Schizophrenia Clinical & Research Program (SCRP)
First Episode & Early Psychosis Program (FEPP)
Resilience & Prevention Program (RAPP)
Depression Clinical & Research Program (DCRP)
Supported by
NIMH
the Sidney R. Baer, Jr Foundation
the Henry and Allison McCance Center for Brain Health
the MGH Research Scholar Program
the MGH Executive Committee on Research (ECOR)
