Dr. Ann Iturra-Mena is a neuroscientist working at the intersection of psychiatry and data science. Her research aims to develop mechanistically grounded biomarkers to improve the detection and treatment of anxiety and depression across development. She is also an expert in electroencephalography (EEG), with experience across clinical, preclinical, and cross-species research.
Dr. Iturra-Mena earned her PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Valparaíso, Chile. She completed her postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School/McLean Hospital (2019–2022) and the Data Science Institute at Columbia University (2022–2024).


In her preclinical research, she identified behavioral and neural markers of stress vulnerability and developed translational EEG markers of drug effects on cognitive control and reward learning. In child psychiatry, she has developed multimodal predictive models of cognitive control deficits in anxiety and examined predictors of treatment response to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).
She received the 2024 Brain & Behavior Research Foundation Young Investigator Award to apply AI to the identification of voice-based markers of treatment response to exposure-based CBT in anxious youth.