Our Team

Dr. Camprodon is Chief of the Division of Neuropsychiatry and Neuromodulation and Director of the Laboratory for Neuropsychiatry and Neuromodulation at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Clinically, he is the founding director of the MGH Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) clinical service, a member of the Psychiatric Neurosurgery Committee and an attending physician in the departments of Psychiatry (Neuropsychiatry) and Neurology (Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology). He is board-certified in Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurology-Neuropsychiatry. Dr. Camprodon’s practice focuses on Neuropsychiatry and Behavioral Neurology, working clinically across the Departments of Psychiatry and Neurology at MGH. Using an integrated clinical neuroscience model, he cares for patients with comorbid neurological and psychiatric disorders, or presenting with atypical syndromes including disordered cognition, behavior and/or emotion in the context of known or suspected brain pathology. Dr. Camprodon’s clinical and research work focuses on Interventional Neuromodulation, using traditional and novel brain stimulation techniques such as Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS), Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT), Vagus Nerve Stimulation (VNS) and Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS). Research in his laboratory uses multimodal combinations of neuroimaging and brain stimulation to investigate neural circuitry and plasticity in a translational manner. He is interested in understanding basic circuit properties of human neural networks and how maladaptive plastic changes lead to neuropsychiatric disorders. Critical efforts, central to his role as a clinician-scientist, are geared toward applying the paradigms and methods of basic systems neuroscience to develop high-impact clinical tools, identify targets for therapeutic action and design individualized image-guided neuromodulation treatments. Dr. Camprodon studied Philosophy and Medicine at the University of Barcelona. After a neuroimaging research fellowship in the Department of Neurology at the Humboldt University in Berlin (Germany), he moved to Boston to pursue a PhD in Neuroscience in the Department of Neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and a Master’s in Public Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. After completing his scientific training, he continued his research as junior faculty in the Department of Neurology at Harvard, until he joined MGH to do a Psychiatry residency, be the chief resident of the MGH Psychiatric Consultation Service and complete a clinical fellowship in Behavioral Neurology and Neuropsychiatry.

Dr. Cassano is Director of the Photobiomodulation Program in the Division of Neuropsychiatry and Neuromodulation at MGH. His work addresses inequality in brain health, which hampers people’s lives. He is interested in revolutionary interventions to treat and to prevent brain disorders. His focus is on the use of light (photobiomodulation with red and near-infrared light) to improve brain health. Near-infrared light is natural, as it represents one third of sunlight.

Brain disorders are just the tip of the iceberg. For all healthy people, who are fortunate not to experience symptoms of a brain disorder, the brain is still continuously under the wear and tear of life stressors and of aging. Prolonged stress affects our brain by leading to excessive inflammation and oxidation of the brain, as well as by decreasing brain energy and brain rejuvenation (also called neuroplasticity). Overtime, this cumulative brain damage is considered to predispose to brain disorders.

Among the new potential interventions, photobiomodulation with red and infrared light specifically targets the wear and tear of the brain and brings new hopes of improving or maintaining brain health.

His efforts, as a clinician and scientist, are focused on making this new intervention available to people, on studying its clinical applications and on guiding its optimal use.

Brain health is essential to mothers and fathers who want to decrease their chances of contracting a familial brain disease, such as dementia. Brain health is also important to daughters and sons who during puberty are more at risk of mood and anxiety disorders and of suicide. The lack of brain health is likely to affect all our relationships: in the couple, at home, at work and in life in general; therefore, altering the bonds, which make life meaningful.

By addressing their brain health, people might have an opportunity to blossom and to strive for what they believe in; possibly, to overturn an unfair script of their biology.

Dr. Ellard is the Director of Dimensional Neuroimaging Research in the Division of Neuropsychiatry and Neuromodulation at MGH. She completed her PhD in clinical psychology at Boston University under the mentorship of Dr. David Barlow, and completed her clinical internship and postdoctoral fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School. She was co-developer and co-author of the Unified Protocol for Transdiagnostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders, a cognitive behavioral treatment designed to target emotion dysregulation across mood and anxiety disorders, which has now been translated into six languages. Dr. Ellard’s research uses transdiagnostic, dimension-based neuroscience and behavioral approaches to understand the roots of severe cognitive and affective dysregulation in neuropsychiatric disorders, and to find more efficient and effective means to address this dysregulation through combined behavioral and neuromodulatory approaches such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and deep brain stimulation (DBS). She has received several foundation awards and two NIH National Research Service Awards for her research program (F31/F32), including most recently a Fellowship Award through the MGH and Brown University Joint Training Program in Recovery and Restoration of CNS Health and Function (T32) and a Mentored Patient-Oriented Career Development Award (K23) from the NIMH.

Her research program focuses on bridging neuroscience, transdiagnostic functional assessment and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) approaches to improve patient outcomes in neuropsychiatric disorders, and particularly bipolar mood and anxiety disorders. A particular emphasis in her research is the effect of neurocircuit dysfunction associated with emotion regulation on the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral impairments experienced by individuals suffering these disorders. The overall aim of her research program is to push the field towards a neuro-rehabilitative model of intervention for severe psychopathology, wherein the synergistic combination of behaviorally and dimensionally informed neuromodulation and CBT can serve to improve both the capacity and the ability to successfully regulate bipolar mood and anxiety symptoms, thereby improving wellness and daily functioning. To accomplish this, Dr. Ellard have been systematically investigating 1) the neural bases of emotion and cognitive dysfunction in bipolar mood and anxiety disorders, and the relationship to CBT treatment response; 2) the efficacy of innovative emotion focused CBT interventions in addressing emotion and cognitive dysfunction in bipolar mood and anxiety disorders, and barriers to treatment response; and 3) the development of novel non-invasive neuromodulatory approaches that target and improve neurocircuit function implicated in emotion regulation. The future goals of her research program will be to test the neuro-rehabilitative model, by evaluating whether sequentially combining non-invasive neuromodulation (aimed at rehabilitating emotion regulation related neurocircuitry) with emotion focused CBT (aimed at learning and consolidating adaptive emotion reguation skills) can improve outcomes for severe bipolar mood and anxiety disorders.

Dr. Barbour is the Medical Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) clinical service, and an attending physician in the Department of Psychiatry. Dr. Barbour practices psychiatry by focusing on the individual and their unique strengths to deliver highly individualized care by utilizing her experience in psychotherapy, clinical neuroscience, and mind-body medicine to treat patients with multiple mental and physical comorbidities. Dr. Barbour’s research interests focus on addressing ways of improving treatment outcomes using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) through individualized treatment planning. Dr. Barbour received her medical degree from Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, Michigan. After graduating from medical school, Dr. Barbour moved to Boston to join the combined Massachusetts General Hospital and McLean Hospital Adult Psychiatry Residency Program. During residency, she joined the program’s research track and served as the chief resident of McLean Hospital’s Clinical Evaluation Center. Following residency, Dr. Barbour was awarded the competitive Dupont-Warren Fellowship from Harvard Medical School, to learn advanced methods in neuroimaging and neuroscience research. Recently, Dr. Barbour was awarded a nationally prestigious NARSAD Young Investigator Award from the Brain and Behavior Foundation to study neuroimaging correlates of social behavior and social dysfunction.

Dr. Eldaief is a clinical neuroscientist interested in better understanding how maladaptive brain states, measured with resting-state functional connectivity, promote the manifestation of specific neuropsychiatric symptoms (e.g. apathy, anhedonia, anxiety, disinhibition). He is specifically interested in intrinsic corticolimbic networks anchored in prefrontal cortex and interconnected to regions involved in affective processing such as: amygdala, hippocampal formation, frontoinsular cortex, ventral and dorsal striatum, orbitofrontal and peri-genual cingulate cortex. Dr. Eldaief’s work investigates how these corticolimbic circuits dynamically change across timescales, with different processing demands, and in response to directed neuromodulation. To examine this, he has adopted multimodal experimental approaches which combine transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) with resting-state MRI and positron emission tomography (PET).

Dr. Eryilmaz is a cognitive neuroscientist and biomedical engineer. His research focuses on neural correlates of attention and working memory and the mechanisms by which they are impaired in psychopathology. His current project uses fMRI to identify the brain networks associated with working memory deficits in first-episode psychosis and leverages TMS to gauge plasticity of such deficits and obtain imaging predictors of recovery in the early phase of illness.

Dr. Jamil received his B.Sc in Biology at University of Maryland, College Park, his M.Sc in Neuroimaging at Kings College London (UK), and his Ph.D in Neuroscience at the University of Goettingen (Germany). He is currently a post-doctoral research fellow in the Laboratory of Neuropsychiatry and Neuromodulation. Asif’s research is focused on innovating and optimizing the design and application of non-invasive neuromodulation techniques such as TMS, tACS and tDCS for potential use in neuropsychiatric disorders. His doctoral and post-doctoral work, which combined neuromodulation with neuroimaging techniques (e.g., EEG and fMRI), has advanced the mechanistic understanding of how non-invasive brain stimulation alters neurophysiology, neuroplasticity, and ultimately behavior and function.

Dr. Wade completed his PhD in bioengineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he was mentored by Dr. Paul Thompson. His postdoctoral research continued at the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center at UCLA with Dr. Katherine Narr and the University of Utah with Dr. David Tate. His work has been supported by several awards from the National Institute of Mental Health (K99/R00), the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (NARSAD Young Investigator Award), and the National Science Foundation (GRFP). He is currently an Instructor at MGH and HMS.

Dr. Wade’s research is focused on developing statistical and machine learning models to identify biomarkers of antidepressant response using multimodal neuroimaging data. Motivated by the recognition that symptoms of mood disorders are heterogenous both within and across classically-defined diagnostic boundaries, his work also focuses on the development of diagnostic biomarkers to detect the presence of transdiagnostic symptom disturbances. Data-driven methods hold great promise for the development of more personalized treatment strategies. His work aims to leverage these methods to jointly contend with symptomatic heterogeneity of mood disorders and identify robust biomarkers to improve prognostic and diagnostic precision in psychiatry.

Dr. Ning received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Minnesota. His research interests lie in developing computational algorithms for joint analysis of structural and functional brain networks using diffusion and functional MRI. He is also interested in developing super-resolution and multi-dimensional neuroimaging techniques to investigate the microstructure of brain tissue. His clinical research focus is on applying novel neuroimaging techniques to understand the mechanism and target engagement of neuromodulation therapies including transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Dr. Ning is also affiliated with the Psychiatry Neuroimaging Laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Dr. Kritzer-Cheren is the Director of Preclinical Research in the Division of Neuropsychiatry and Neuromodulation at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He received his MD and PhD from the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. He then completed his psychiatry residency at Duke University and his fellowship in Behavioral Neurology and Neuropsychiatry at MGH. Dr. Kritzer-Cheren is an attending physician in Neuropsychiatry, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation and the Acute Psychiatric Service. He is also a Research Fellow through the Psychiatry Department’s Translational Neuroscience Training for Clinicians T32 investigating neurocircuit-based mechanisms of the lateral septum’s role in motivated behavior after stress and with neuromodulation.

Dr. Santarnecchi is an Associate Professor of Radiology at Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and the director of the Precision Neuroscience & Neuromodulation program (PNN) and the Network Control Laboratory at the Gordon Center for Medical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH).

Dr. Santarnecchi’s program focuses on combining multimodal neuroimaging (e.g., MRI, fMRI, DTI, PET) and electrophysiology (e.g., EEG, EMG, MEG) methods for the identification of novel diagnostic/prognostic biomarkers and the development of therapeutic approaches for patients with neurological and psychiatric conditions. In particular, Dr. Santarnecchi’s research is centered around the development of personalized, network-based Noninvasive Brain Stimulation (NiBS) approaches to modulate brain plasticity, guide connectome rewiring, boost resilience and enhance cognitive function and reserve, with the ultimate goal of promoting brain health and healthy aging. His team is currently working on machine/deep learning solutions for perturbation-based brain connectivity analysis (e.g., TMS-EEG), NIBS approaches to modulate sleep and memory, high-frequency transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) interventions for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and Frontotemporal dementia, and novel fMRI-based markers of disease progression in patients with brain tumors. His work on brain health also includes studies on space physiology in collaboration with NASA, for the development of potential countermeasures to maintain optimal brain performance in extreme environments including spaceflight. Dr. Santarnecchi also holds a Clinical Psychology and Neuropsychology degree and a Psy.D. in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy; his team is investigating how to combine brain connectomics and noninvasive brain stimulation to maximize the effect of psychotherapy by increasing brain plasticity or by consolidating clinical effects during sleep.

Dr. Hadimani an Associate Professor and the Director of the Biomagnetics Laboratory at the Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering of Virginia Commonwealth University. He is currently on sabbatical as a Visiting Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, Harvard University. He has founded the IEEE Joint Magnetics and Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society’s Richmond Chapter, and he is the current vice chair of the chapter. He is an Associate Editor of the journals, Frontiers of Neuroscience and American Institute of Physics (AIP) Advances.

Dr. Hadimani’s research focuses on biomagnetic materials and devices for biomedical applications. He has developed a first-of-a-kind anatomically accurate brain phantom for validating neuromodulation procedures that are commercialized through the university spin-off company RAM Phantoms LLC. His lab has designed and fabricated a novel focal stimulation coil using ferromagnetic cores that can stimulate only a local region of the primary motor cortex of small animals. He is currently working to experimentally verify the results from coil design in rats. He is also working to establish an accurate mechanism underlying TMS by investigating the neuron’s firing patterns in several regions of the brain induced by cortical stimulation and by establishing the role of individual nuclei in affecting other nuclei of the motor circuitry. This will enable the future development of effective TMS protocols for the diagnosis and treatment of several neurological and psychiatric disorders.

Dr. Hadimani has received several international awards, including the UK Energy Innovation Award and the International Young Scientist Fellowship from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). He also received the Engineer of the Year award from the Richmond Joint Engineers’ Council in 2021. He has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed original research papers, more than 210 international conference papers, 12 current and pending patents, several invited trade magazine articles, a book, and 3 book chapters to date. Dr. Hadimani has a ‘first class’ honors degree in Mechanical Engineering from Kuvempu University, India, an MS in Mechatronics from the University of Newcastle, UK, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Cardiff University, UK. He has served as a Project Scientist at the Institute of Materials Research and Innovation of the University of Bolton, UK. He was an Adjunct Assistant Professor and Associate Scientist at Iowa State University and was also an Associate at Ames Laboratory, US Dept. of Energy.

Dr. Rivas-Grajales is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine and Director of Neuropsychiatry and Neuromodulation at Boston Medical Center. Dr. Rivas-Grajales completed residency training in psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine and a clinical fellowship in Behavioral Neurology and Neuropsychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in June 2022. Her research focuses on the understanding of the mechanism of action of neuromodulation therapies for treatment-resistant depression, and in identifying clinical and imaging biomarkers of rapid-acting antidepressants.

Dr. Chowdhury is an applied physicist and instructor in the Division of Neuropsychiatry and Neuromodulation. She received her terminal degree in Physics from Duke University, Durham,NC. After her graduation, she worked as a research scientist at Xerox (Xerox Innovation Group, Webster,NY ) on printer based image processing. After the industry stint, she took a personal sabbatical to stay home with her two daughters. She returned to an academic career at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell via the M. Hildred Blewett fellowship from the American Physical Society. She is also the winner of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) American fellowship for the year 2020-2021.

Dr. Chowdhury has a breadth of research experience solving research problems in industrial and academic settings. She currently applies mathematical physics to problems at the intersection of physics, imaging and neuro-biology. Her interests involve creating and applying graph-theoretical algorithms, including machine learning/deep learning based algorithms to multimodality neuroimaging datasets in order to better understand neurological disorders.

Apart from research, she is interested in teaching undergraduate students. She has previously run tutoring practice teaching college level courses in mathematics and physics including pro-bono tutoring for community college students. She is keen on equitable distribution of education and teaches a linear algebra course every year at a local community college.

Dr. Cho is an Instructor in the Division of Neuropsychiatry and Neuromodulation at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Yoonju Cho began her training at Johns Hopkins University, where she received PhD in biomedical engineering studying sensory perception on human subjects as well as animal models. Then, she joined NYU Grossman School of Medicine for accelerated MD-residency training, where she fast-tracked into residency in psychiatry with focus on developing engineering solutions to clinical questions. Dr. Cho then completed a clinical fellowship in Interventional Neuropsychiatry and Neuromodulation at MGH. Dr. Cho’s current clinical and research interests include advancing and integrating neurostimulation treatment methods such as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and transcranial photobiomodulation (tPBM).