This is a neuroimaging study conducted at McLean Hospital which is focused on studying changes in functional brain network architecture in patients with OCD over the course of intensive, residential treatment. The goal of this project is to study changes in brain networks and harm avoidance behavior that track with OCD-related symptoms and illness behavior […]
Adolescence is characterized by profound change, including increases in negative emotions. Approximately 84% of American adolescents own a smartphone, which can continuously and unobtrusively track variables potentially predictive of heightened negative emotions (e.g. activity levels, location, pattern of phone usage). The extent to which built-in smartphone sensors can reliably predict states of elevated negative affect […]
GPS analysis pipeline
Locations of people moving about their lives are now commonly tracked through smartphones and wearable devices that access the Global Positioning System (GPS). Immediate measures include the estimated locations that identify visited map points and the travel paths between them. Here we introduce DPLocate, an open-source GPS data analysis pipeline designed to derive measures that […]
Rosie graduated with a BA in Psychology, Classics, and Neuroscience from Williams College, where she researched opioid use disorder and evaluated novel pharmacological treatments for post-acute withdrawal syndrome using a rodent model. Rosie joined the Biological Psychiatry Lab in June 2022 and has been working closely with Dr. Brennan on his study investigating individually targeted […]
Mobile technology enables unprecedented continuous monitoring of an individual’s behavior, social interactions, symptoms, and other health conditions, presenting an enormous opportunity for therapeutic advancements and scientific discoveries regarding the etiology of psychiatric illness. Continuous collection of mobile data results in the generation of a new type of data: entangled multivariate time series of outcome, exposure, […]
Mapping individual differences in behavior is fundamental to personalized neuroscience, but quantifying complex behavior in real world settings remains a challenge. While mobility patterns captured by smartphones have increasingly been linked to a range of psychiatric symptoms, existing research has not specifically examined whether individuals have person-specific mobility patterns. We collected over 3000 days of mobility data […]
In collaboration with the Harvard Brain Initiative Bipolar Seed Grant Program, the goals of this project were to use Motion Sequencing, an unsupervised behavioral discovery platform, to characterize the behavior of two mouse models of bipolar disorder in which behavioral deficits are linked to metabolic changes (hyperthyroid and AKAP11 deleted mice), and to characterize the […]
In collaboration with Kerry Ressler, the goal of this project is to improve our understanding of the neurobiology and treatment of anhedonia.
Psychiatry has long needed a better and more scalable way to capture the dynamics of behavior and its disturbances, quantitatively across multiple data channels, at high temporal resolution in real time. By combining 24/7 data—on location, movement, email and text communications, and social media—with brain scans, genetics, genomics, neuropsychological batteries, and clinical interviews, researchers will […]