I have a faculty appointment at HMS and lead the Research Department @ The Institute for the Study of Resilience in Youth (ISRY). ISRY at McLean Hospital, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, creates and fosters evidence-based innovations in social-emotional development (SED) and Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) so that increasingly "young people can learn, dream, and thrive." The ISRY team provides trainings and assessment tools that inform educational programs and professionals about program quality in schools and afterschool settings. ISRY has evolved into a recognized translational center that adapts research findings into practices for schools and afterschool programs, and conversely, draws insight from its experience in the field to generate relevant research, training and policy recommendations.

As Director of Research at the Institute for the Study of Resilience in Youth (ISRY) at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School, I engage in all aspects of research and development and lead a team in a range of ongoing nationwide research projects. Specifically, my role involves supervising research department staff; preparing and executing research protocols; collecting, organizing, and analyzing data; validating assessment tools; writing and publishing reports; managing evaluation projects; and communicating with ISRY’s partners and collaborators across the U.S. and beyond.

Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Stuart T. Hauser, M.D., Ph.D. Harvard Clinical Research Training Program in Biological and Social Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. The primary goal of this fellowship is to characterize the neural correlates of cognitive and emotional dysregulation in anorexia nervosa using a translational research approach.

PSY 38: Methods in Clinical Psychology

I was a graduate research associate in the Nutrition & Behavior Laboratory of Dr. Robin B. Kanarek, and my research focused on the influence of functional foods and dietary supplements on brain chemistry, cognition/mood, and behavior. My dissertation work was a successful collaborative effort involving experts in nutrition, behavioral pharmacology, endocrinology, and neurobiology. Briefly, we investigated plausible neural mechanisms underlying the effects of creatine supplementation on depressive behavior using a rodent model that predicts antidepressant efficacy. The most notable outcome of this research was the finding that dietary creatine altered depression-related gene expression in the hippocampus (as measured using qRT-PCR) in a sex-, stress-, and time-dependent manner.

- PSY40: Physiological Psychology Lab (Fall 2007)- PSY32: Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences + Lab (Spring 2008)- PSY1: Intro to Psychology (Fall 2008; Spring 2010)- PSY38: Research Methods in Clinical Psychology (Spring 2009)- PSY103: Brain and Behavior (Fall 2009)- PSY25: Physiological Psychology (Teaching Fellow, Fall 2010)

PSY 212: Introduction to Biological Psychology

I served as Clinical Research Assistant II in the Behavioral Pharmacology Laboratory of Dr. Sherry A. McKee. I coordinated two NIH-funded human laboratory studies examining factors that may influence the development of substance-use disorders and lapse behavior in patients with diverse clinical histories (e.g. schizophrenia, depression, substance abuse).