2. Profile
  3. Annmarie MacNamara

Annmarie MacNamara PhD

Annmarie MacNamara
Designation
  • Assistant Professor, Texas A&M University
  • T32 in the Neuroscience of Mental Health Graduate
Website Profile Type
  • Alumni

Annmarie MacNamara's overarching goal is to transform from a clinical psychologist to a clinician neuroscientist. Annmarie's long term research goal is to reduce the cost and suffering associated with anxiety by closing gaps between overlapping phenotypic features (e.g., symptoms) and underlying neurobiological dysfunction, in order to a) develop more refined phenotypic definitions of anxiety and b) increase precision in the definition of treatment targets. For example, in the future, clinicians could use neurobiological tools as supplements to their review of symptomatology and medical history, in order to classify patients more precisely and guide them towards a course of treatment based on their underlying neuropathophysiology that has a greater likelihood of success.

  • Share your experience with the T32 Fellowship Program

    In 2015, I finished my training on the BNTP T32 and transitioned to the first year of my 4-year, NIMH sponsored K23 Career Development Award, continuing work with my mentor, Dr. K. Luan Phan. My project focused on elucidating the biological basis of comorbidity load in the anxiety disorders using startle eyeblink data collected simultaneously with fMRI data in the scanner. In 2016, I started as Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University, where I established my independent Multimethod Affect and Cognition (MAC) lab. Since this time, I have been growing my program in the affective neuroscience of anxiety and depression. This is supported by 5 active grants, including 2 federally-funded awards totaling nearly $1,000,000. I now have 35 peer-reviewed publications in journals such as Neuropsychopharmacology; Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging; Journal of Abnormal Psychology and Depression and Anxiety. The quality of these publications has been recognized on several occasions (e.g., “Paper of the Year”, Psychonomic Society and Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience, 2011; Anxiety and Depression Association of America, Donald F. Klein Early Career Investigator Award, Finalist, 2017). I was named a 2018 Rising Starby the Association for Psychological Science and received the Biological Psychiatry Travel Award (2014). I am a consulting editor for Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience (CABN)and Psychophysiology, and have been an NIH Early Career Reviewer (Adult Psychopathology and Aging study section, Feb. 2019). The broad exposure to neuroscience I received as a postdoc in the BNTP has allowed me to develop a program to bring psychopathological diagnosis closer to its underlying, biological mechanisms.