Faculty

T32 in the Neuroscience of Mental Health | About Us

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Faculty

Olusola Ajilore MD, PhD

  • Associate Head for Faculty Development
  • University of Illinois Center for Depression and Resilience (UI CDR) Professor of Psychiatry
  • Director, Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program
  • Director, Clinical Research Core/Center for Clinical and Translational Science
  • Director, Adult Neuroscience Residency Research Track
  • Co-Director, UICOM Medical Scientist Training Program
  • Department of Psychiatry
  • University of Illinois-Chicago
Dr. Ajilore's research goal is to understand the pathophysiology of major depressive disorder in the context of medical co-morbidities and late life using novel magnetic resonance imaging techniques. His group focuses on using structural and functional brain connectivity to study the brain as a network.

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Beatriz Penalver Bernabé PhD, MS

  • Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Psychiatry

Dr. Bernabé is a Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago. Her current research is focused on the relationship between the human microbiome and perinatal disease. Her interest in the gut microbial evolution during pregnancy in mothers that suffer from antenatal or postpartum depression has led to an exciting collaboration with the Women’s Mental Health Research Program at UIC.

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Ernesto R. Bongarzone PhD

  • Professor, Department of Anatomy & Cell Biology
  • College of Medicine
  • University of Illinois Chicago
Ernesto Bongarzone

Katie L. Burkhouse PhD

  • Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, The Ohio State University
Dr. Burkhouse is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and a Clinical Psychologist affiliated with UIC’s Pediatric Mood Disorders Clinic. She received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from Binghamton University (SUNY) and completed her Clinical Internship at UIC. Her program of research broadly focuses on identifying behavioral-brain risk phenotypes and preventive interventions for youth depressive disorders. Much of this work focuses on utilizing multiple levels of analysis (i.e., behavioral, EEG, pupil dilation, fMRI) to identify cognitive-affective processing styles involved in the transmission of depression from parents to their offspring. A second focus of her research involves applying this mechanism-based work to prevention efforts for youth at high risk for depression. The ultimate goal of this work is to improve the identification and prevention of internalizing disorders in children and adolescents.

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Philip Clifford PhD

  • Associate Dean, Research, College of Applied Health Sciences
  • Professor, Kinesiology and Nutrition
  • University of Illinois Chicago
Dr. Philip Clifford came to UIC from the Medical College of Wisconsin where he served as associate dean of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and Professor of Anesthesiology and Physiology. His research efforts have been aimed at elucidating the physiological mechanisms regulating skeletal muscle blood flow during exercise.

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Edwin H. Cook Jr. MD

  • Earl M Bane Professor of Psychiatry
  • Associate Head, Clinical Services
  • Director, Program for Neurodevelopmental Disorders
Dr. Cook is the Director of Program for Neurodevelopmental Disorders and the Associate Head of Clinical Services in the department. Dr. Cook is board certified in both Psychiatry and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. He specializes in treating comorbid psychiatric disorders for individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Dr. Cook is also the Earl M. Bane Professor of Psychiatry.

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Tory Eisenlohr-Moul PhD

  • Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology
  • Associate Director of Translational Research in Women’s Mental Health
  • Department of Psychiatry
  • University of Illinois Chicago College of Medicine
Dr. Eisenlohr-Moul is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at UIC, and holds an additional courtesy appointment in the Department of Psychology. She is a licensed clinical psychologist with specialized fellowship training in the pathophysiology, assessment, and treatment of hormone-related psychiatric disorders-- particularly premenstrual disorders.

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Alessandro Guidotti MD

  • Scientific Director, Psychiatric Institute
  • Distinguished Professor
Alessandro Guidotti is the Scientific Director of the Psychiatric Institute, and Professor of Psychiatry and Biochemistry at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois Chicago. Prof. Guidotti’s outstanding research record ranges from the report that benzodiazepines, allosterically acting at specific GABAa receptor sites, enhance GABA’s gating of Cl channels dating back to the 1970′s up to his recent pioneer studies on the role of reelin in human cortex and on demethylation of promoters expressed in GABAergic neurons as a potential mechanism of antipsychotic action.

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Tamar Heller PhD

  • Distinguished Professor, Department Head, Director—IDHD, Disability and Human Development
  • College of Applied Health Sciences
  • Director, DHD Family Clinic
  • University of Illinois Chicago
Tamar Heller is a distinguished professor and head of the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois Chicago. I direct its University Center of Excellence in Developmental Disabilities, Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Developmental Disabilities and Health, Developmental Disabilities Family Clinics, and TAP autism program.

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Heide Klumpp PhD

  • Associate Professor
Dr. Klumpp takes a neuroscience approach to understand internalizing disorders such as anxiety and depression for clinical translation. To this end, she uses electroencephalography and magnetic resonance imaging to delineate brain-based markers of clinical behavior and treatment outcome. She also uses sleep measures (e.g., actigraphy) to understand the intersection of sleep and internalizing disorders.

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Orly Lazarov PhD

  • Professor
  • University of Illinois Chicago
  • Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology

Dr. Lazarov is a Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at the University of Illinois Chicago. Dr. Lazarov started her scientific career as a graduate student at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. 

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Alex Leow MD, PhD

  • Professor in Psychiatry and Bioengineering
  • University of Illinois Chicago
Joining the University in 2009, Dr. Leow received clinical training in Psychiatry and research training in biomedical imaging, both at UCLA. Having co-authored more than 70 articles, Dr. Leow's current research interests focus on developing novel probabilistic reconstruction, tractography, and network analyses techniques for high angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI) and their clinical applications.

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Jeffrey A. Loeb MD, PhD

  • John S. Garvin Chair, Professor & Head
  • University of Illinois Chicago
  • Department of Neurology and Rehabilitation
Dr. Loeb currently serves as the department head of the UIC Department of Neurology & Rehabilitation and previously was a professor in the department of neurology and the associate director of The Center for Molecular Medicine and Genetics at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, Michigan. He received his MD and PhD from the University of Chicago and went on to complete a residency in neurology at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston then followed by fellowship training in epilepsy and clinical neurophysiology at Harvard’s Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital.

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Pauline Maki PhD

  • Professor of Psychiatry, Psychology and Obstetrics & Gynecology
  • Director of Women’s Mental Health Research Program
  • Senior Director of Research, Center for Research on Women and Gender
For over 20 years, Dr. Pauline M. Maki has led a program of NIH-funded research focused on the role of sex steroid hormones on cognition, mood, brain function (neuroimaging) and stress responsivity in women. Women’s cognitive abilities, mood, and response to stress can be affected by changes in sex hormones, like estrogen, including changes that occur during the menopausal transition, during pregnancy, and across the menstrual cycle. In particular, the goal of her work is to improve the lives of women by identifying factors that alter their risk of cognitive decline and affective disorders.

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Subhash C. Pandey PhD

  • Joseph A. Flaherty MD, Endowed Professor of Psychiatry
  • Director, Center for Alcohol Research in Epigenetics
  • Professor of Biochemistry in Psychiatry
  • Professor of Anatomy and Cell Biology
  • Director, Neuroscience Alcoholism Research
  • Senior VA Career Research Scientist
  • Department of Psychiatry, College of Medicine, University of Illinois Chicago
Dr. Subhash Pandey is a nationally and internationally well-known neuroscientist in the alcohol addiction field and has contributed significantly towards a better understanding of the neurobiology of alcoholism. Two striking features of alcohol addiction are the rapid onset of tolerance to the acute effects of alcohol and the development of ethanol withdrawal symptoms after cessation of protracted ethanol consumption.

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Graziano Pinna PhD

  • Associate Professor
  • Department of Psychiatry
  • University of Illinois Chicago College of Medicine
Graziano Pinna, PhD, main research focus is on PTSD Research and Education. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UIC. He earned her undergraduate degree and a Laurea of Doctor at University of Cagliari (Italy). He obtained a PhD in Neuroendocrinology at the Free University of Berlin (Berlin, Germany) before being appointed as Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, UIC.

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Michael Ragozzino PhD

  • Department of Psychology, UIC

Dr. Michael Ragozzino's research program involves taking a neural systems approach to understanding the neurobiology of learning and memory. His interest focuses on investigating the principles and neural mechanisms that govern the ability to learn new rules and inhibit old rules under changing environmental conditions.

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Mark Rasenick PhD

  • Distinguished Professor of Physiology & Biophysics and Psychiatry
  • Director, Biomedical Neuroscience Training Program
  • Research Career Scientist, Jesse Brown VAMC
  • University of Illinois Chicago College of Medicine

Dr. Rasenick’s work has focused on G protein signaling in the nervous system and the relationship of neurotransmitter activation to rapid modification of the cytoskeleton.  He has been particularly interested in how G proteins and the cytoskeleton work in concert to modify synaptic shape and to form a molecular basis for depression and the action of antidepressant drugs.

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Janet Richmond PhD

  • Professor, Department of Biological Sciences
  • College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
  • University of Illinois Chicago

Dr. Richmond's Research. Synaptic transmission is the principal form of rapid communication between neurons. In this calcium-regulated process, synaptic vesicles are triggered to fuse with the presynaptic membrane at specialized active zones. Vesicle fusion releases neurotransmitter that binds to and activates post-synaptic receptors.

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Jamie D. Roitman PhD

  • Associate Professor
  • Department of Psychology
Jamie D Roitman

Mitch Roitman PhD

  • Associate Professor
  • Department of Psychology, UIC
Mitchell Roitman

Kuei Y. Tseng MD, PhD

  • Associate Professor
  • Department of Anatomy & Cell Biology
  • University of Illinois Chicago, College of Medicine
Kuie Y. Tseng

William E. Walden PhD

  • Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs
  • Professor – Microbiology & Immunology, College of Medicine
  • University of Illinois Chicago
William Walden

Zaijie (Jim) Wang PhD

  • Professor of Pharmocology and Pharmaceutics, Biopharmaceutical Sciences
  • College of Pharmacy
  • University of Illinois Chicago
Z Jim Wang

Richard Zigmond PhD

  • Professor, Department of Neurosciences, School of Medicine
  • Case Western Reserve University
Richard Zigmond

Mark Rasenick PhD

  • Distinguished Professor of Physiology & Biophysics and Psychiatry
  • Director, Biomedical Neuroscience Training Program
  • Research Career Scientist, Jesse Brown VAMC
  • University of Illinois Chicago College of Medicine

Dr. Rasenick’s work has focused on G protein signaling in the nervous system and the relationship of neurotransmitter activation to rapid modification of the cytoskeleton.  He has been particularly interested in how G proteins and the cytoskeleton work in concert to modify synaptic shape and to form a molecular basis for depression and the action of antidepressant drugs.

View Profile

Olusola Ajilore MD, PhD

  • Associate Head for Faculty Development
  • University of Illinois Center for Depression and Resilience (UI CDR) Professor of Psychiatry
  • Director, Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program
  • Director, Clinical Research Core/Center for Clinical and Translational Science
  • Director, Adult Neuroscience Residency Research Track
  • Co-Director, UICOM Medical Scientist Training Program
  • Department of Psychiatry
  • University of Illinois-Chicago
Dr. Ajilore's research goal is to understand the pathophysiology of major depressive disorder in the context of medical co-morbidities and late life using novel magnetic resonance imaging techniques. His group focuses on using structural and functional brain connectivity to study the brain as a network.

View Profile

Edwin H. Cook Jr. MD

  • Earl M Bane Professor of Psychiatry
  • Associate Head, Clinical Services
  • Director, Program for Neurodevelopmental Disorders
Dr. Cook is the Director of Program for Neurodevelopmental Disorders and the Associate Head of Clinical Services in the department. Dr. Cook is board certified in both Psychiatry and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. He specializes in treating comorbid psychiatric disorders for individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Dr. Cook is also the Earl M. Bane Professor of Psychiatry.

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Alex Leow MD, PhD

  • Professor in Psychiatry and Bioengineering
  • University of Illinois Chicago
Joining the University in 2009, Dr. Leow received clinical training in Psychiatry and research training in biomedical imaging, both at UCLA. Having co-authored more than 70 articles, Dr. Leow's current research interests focus on developing novel probabilistic reconstruction, tractography, and network analyses techniques for high angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI) and their clinical applications.

View Profile

Pauline Maki PhD

  • Professor of Psychiatry, Psychology and Obstetrics & Gynecology
  • Director of Women’s Mental Health Research Program
  • Senior Director of Research, Center for Research on Women and Gender
For over 20 years, Dr. Pauline M. Maki has led a program of NIH-funded research focused on the role of sex steroid hormones on cognition, mood, brain function (neuroimaging) and stress responsivity in women. Women’s cognitive abilities, mood, and response to stress can be affected by changes in sex hormones, like estrogen, including changes that occur during the menopausal transition, during pregnancy, and across the menstrual cycle. In particular, the goal of her work is to improve the lives of women by identifying factors that alter their risk of cognitive decline and affective disorders.

View Profile