Tracy L. Bale is the Anschutz Foundation Endowed Chair in Women's Integrated Mental and Physical Health at the Ludeman Center and Professor and Director for InterGenerational Stress and Health and the Director for Sex Differences Research in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Washington in the Department of Pharmacology, and her postdoctoral work at the Salk Institute with Dr. Wylie Vale. Dr. Bale was previously Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania for 15 years. Her research focuses on the role of stress in neuropsychiatric disease, and the sex differences that underlie disease vulnerability in humans using the mouse as a preclinical model. She is interested in adversity across the lifespan, including at the germ cell level and the mechanisms involved in altering brain development. Dr. Bale’s lab attempts to translate research to humans to identify those processes and biomarkers important for promoting disease risk and resilience, especially in vulnerable populations.

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. Using these modalities, they have developed innovative ways of discovering brain alterations associated with major depression that may lead to patient-specific targets for intervention and treatment.

Dr. Laura Huckins is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry. She received her masters in BioEngineering from Imperial College London in 2011, and her PhD in Molecular Biology and Psychiatric Genetics from the University of Cambridge in 2015. Her research focuses primarily on studying psychiatric disorders, with an emphasis on eating disorders and PTSD, as well as development and application of multi-omic methods to interpret the functional consequences of GWAS variants. Her lab focuses particularly on Eating Disorders and PTSD; to this end, she is co-chair of the PGC Eating Disorders working group.

Dr. Martinowich received a B.A. in International Relations from the George Washington University and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles. Following graduate work, she conducted translational research in neuropsychiatry as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health. She joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins and Lieber Institute for Brain Development where she oversees a research group that takes a cross-species approach to study how programs of gene expression in defined populations of cells contribute to circuit function that is relevant for neuropsychiatric disorders. The lab uses genetic manipulation in combination with molecular, cellular and systems-level techniques in animal models, and integrate these data with cell- and circuit-specific transcriptomic studies in the postmortem human brain.

Joanna Steinglass, MD is a Professor of Psychiatry and the Director of Research in the Eating Disorders Clinic at the New York State Psychiatric Institute/Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Dr. Steinglass graduated from Amherst College and Harvard Medical School. She completed her psychiatry training at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute and joined the Eating Disorders Research Clinic in 2003. Dr. Steinglass also serves as Training Co-Director of the Eating Disorders T32 Research Fellowship. Dr. Steinglass’ research investigates Anorexia Nervosa through study of the neural mechanisms of illness and the development of mechanism-based treatments. She conducts interdisciplinary research that uses tools from cognitive and computational neuroscience to apply the latest understanding of the healthy brain to research on Anorexia Nervosa. She applies these insights to the development of behavioral, neuromodulatory, and pharmacological interventions for the treatment of eating disorders.

Dr. Debra Bangasser is a Professor of Neuroscience, Georgia Research Alliance Distinguished Investigator, and Associate Director of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience at Georgia State University.  She also is the principal investigator of the Neuroendocrinology and Behavior Laboratory. Her research program investigates sex differences in stress responses and their contribution to disease vulnerability and resilience. Using techniques from behavioral neuroscience, molecular neuroscience, and neuroendocrinology, her laboratory has identified sex differences in sensitivity to corticotropin releasing factor that bias females towards hyperarousal and males towards cognitive impairments. She also investigates how early life experience can promote sex-specific resilience to alterations in cognition and motivation. Dr. Bangasser’s research program received the Janett Rosenberg Trubatch Career Development Award from the Society for Neuroscience, which recognizes originality and creativity in research, and an American Psychological Association Presidential Citation.

Dr. Carmen Andreescu is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a licensed psychiatrist with additional expertise in Geriatric and Interventional Psychiatry. Dr. Andreescu is a faculty member in the Center for Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh and for the Research Career Institute in the Mental Health of Aging (CIMA) directed by NIMH and Weill Cornell Medical Center. She is the director of the ARGO Neuroscience of Aging Research lab [https://argo.pitt.edu]. Her research focus is on mapping the neural circuitry associated with mood/anxiety phenotypes in late-life, identifying neural markers of treatment response in late-life depression and anxiety, and describing the pathways through which  anxiety accelerates brain aging. Her research has been funded by BBRF, NIMH and NIA. Dr. Andreescu serves as a member on the editorial board of the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, and she is a board member of the Federation Global Initiative on Psychiatry and the president of its American chapter [https://www.gip-global.org]. Dr.

Beatriz Luna, Ph.D. is the Distinguished Staunton Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics and Professor of Psychology and BioEngineering at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the founder and Director of the Laboratory for Neurocognitive Development, the founder and acting past president of the Flux Society for Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, and Editor and Chief of the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. Dr. Luna uses multimodal neuroimaging to investigate the neurobiological mechanisms that support the transition from adolescence to adulthood when lifetime trajectories are determined to inform basic processes of normative development and abnormal trajectories such as in mental illness. She has received numerous awards including the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering, the Provost’s Award for Excellence in Doctoral Mentoring, and Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry. Her research has been continuously supported by the National Institutes of Mental Health and has informed US Supreme Court briefs regarding extended sentencing in the juvenile justice system.