Dr. Ann Iturra-Mena works under the co-mentorship of Dr. Kate Fitzgerald, Ruane Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Dr. Melanie Wall, director of Mental Health Data Science, both from the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI) and Columbia University Psychiatry Department.
Dr. Iturra-Mena is a neuroscientist who specializes in neurophysiology with a background in the use of electrophysiology and a reversed-translational approach to understand the brain mechanisms involved in depression and anxiety disorders. In this field, she utilized animal models together with human EEG data to study specific neural biomarkers of depression and anxiety across species as potential targets for pharmacological treatments.
Currently, as a Postdoctoral Research Scientist in the Data Science Institute, she is expanding her research to generate data driven approaches for the diagnostics of anxiety and depression in children using high dimensional multimodal psychiatric research data.
Dr. Iturra-Mena received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Valparaiso (Chile) and completed her first postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School/McLean Hospital (2019-2022) where she worked under the co-mentorship of Dr. Carol Paronis in the Preclinical Pharmacology Laboratory and Dr. Diego Pizzagalli in the Center for Depression, Anxiety and Stress Research.