Jorge Armony, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University
Jorge Armony, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University
Much of our current understanding of stress-related disorders – including Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), phobias, panic attack, and generalized anxiety – comes from studying how the brain processes fear.
Jorge Armony, PhD conducts research on how the brain detects stimuli in the environment that may signal threat or danger, and how this mechanism interacts with other processes, such as consciousness, attention, and memory.
In his quest for answers, Jorge Armony uses several state-of-the-art research techniques, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), behavioral and physiological measures (i.e. skin conductance and heart rate), as well as computational modeling.
Jennifer Bartz, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, McGill University
Jennifer Bartz, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, McGill University
Professor Bartz is interested in the factors—both individual difference and situational—that facilitate or hinder the prosocial, communal behaviors that are vital to developing and maintaining close relationships. Her research is grounded in empirical social psychology, but she draws upon methods from neuroscience and psychopharmacology to better understand the neurobiological mechanisms underlying prosocial behavior. Although primarily aimed at answering basic scientific questions, her research also is designed to inform our understanding of and treatment of psychiatric disorders involving prominent social impairments (e.g., autism spectrum disorders, and borderline personality disorder).
More info at https://www.mcgill.ca/psychology/jennifer-bartz
Suparna Choudhury, PhD, Assistant Professor, Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry; Co-Director, Culture, Mind, and Brain Program, McGill University
Suparna Choudhury, PhD, Assistant Professor, Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry; Co-Director, Culture, Mind, and Brain Program, McGill University
Suparna Choudhury is an Assistant Professor at the Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University, Co-director of the Culture, Mind, and Brain Program, McGill University, and an Investigator at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research. She did her doctoral research in cognitive neuroscience at University College London, postdoctoral research in transcultural psychiatry at McGill and most recently directed an interdisciplinary research program on critical neuroscience and the developing brain at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science in Berlin. Her current work investigates the production and dissemination of biomedical knowledge – in particular cognitive neuroscience – that shapes the ways in which researchers, clinicians, patients and laypeople understand themselves, their mental health and their illness experiences.
More info at https://www.mcgill.ca/tcpsych/faculty/suparnachoudhury
Maria Gendron, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Yale University
Maria Gendron, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Yale University
Emotions sit at an important nexus in psychological science: they color our experiences of the world, drive our behavior, are critical for human bonding and relationships, and impact health and wellbeing. Yet emotions manifest in widely different forms across cultures, contexts, and individuals. My lab focuses on describing and unpacking these sources of diversity. Ongoing work focuses on the dynamic influences of social, cognitive and cultural processes on emotional experience and perception. This research program is motivated by the proposal that emotional phenomena emerge from multiple, interacting, domain-general systems, including the functioning of the conceptual/semantic system. We adopt a multidisciplinary approach, drawing core concepts from social- cultural psychology and affective neuroscience, using methods ranging from standard laboratory experiments, ambulatory data collection that bridges world and lab, and cross-cultural fieldwork.
More info at https://psychology.yale.edu/people/maria-gendron
Ian Gold, PhD, Professor, Department of Philosophy, McGill University
Ian Gold, PhD, PhD, Professor, Department of Philosophy, McGill University
Ian Gold is the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy & Psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal. He completed a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Princeton University and did postdoctoral training at the Australian National University in Canberra. From 2000 to 2006 he was on the faculty of the School of Philosophy & Bioethics at Monash University in Melbourne and returned to McGill in 2006. His research focusses on the theory of delusion in psychiatric and neurological illness and on reductionism in psychiatry and neuroscience. He is the author of research articles in such journals as Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Mind and Language, Consciousness and Cognition, The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, World Psychiatry, Transcultural Psychiatry, Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, and Cognitive Neuropsychiatry. No Mind is an Island, a book co-written with Joel Gold, is due to appear in 2012.
Ana Gómez-Carrillo, MD, Postdoctoral Fellow, Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University
Ana Gómez-Carrillo, MD, is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry of McGill University. She obtained her medical degree from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain) and recently completed a psychiatry residency and specialized training as a Cognitive Behavioural Therapist at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin (Germany). She spent the last two years working on an in-patient crisis and depression ward with perinatal mental health services, treating mood and somatoform disorders. During her fellowship, she is receiving subspecialty training in immigrant and refugee mental health. Dr. Gomez-Carrillo received funding from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for her doctorate research on depression as a risk factor for cerebrovascular disease. She then spent two years researching the processing of emotions in the primary visual cortex at the Visual Perception Lab of the Charité University Hospital. Her current research focuses on cultural adaptation of psychological interventions and culturally responsive web-based mental health resources. Dr. Gomez-Carrillo also takes a special interest in the philosophy and anthropology of psychiatry, specifically how integrative frameworks guide clinical assessments and interventions. Her work seeks to delineate the intersubjective nature of the diagnostic process and clarify the use of metaphors in the creation of illness narratives and meaning co-construction.
More info at https://www.multiculturalmentalhealth.ca/about-us/staff/
Laurence J. Kirmayer, MD, FRCPC, FCAHS, FRSC, James McGill Professor, Division of Transcultural Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry; Co-Director, Culture, Mind, and Brain Program, McGill University
Laurence J. Kirmayer, MD, FRCPC, FCAHS, FRSC, James McGill Professor and Director, Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University; Co-Director, Culture, Mind and Brain Program, McGill University
Laurence J. Kirmayer, MD, FRCPC, FCAHS, FRSC is James McGill Professor and Director, Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University. He is Editor-in-Chief of Transcultural Psychiatry, and Director of the Culture & Mental Health Research Unit at the Institute of Community and Family Psychiatry, Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, where he conducts research on culturally responsive mental health services for immigrants and refugees, the mental health of Indigenous peoples, and the philosophy of psychiatry. He founded and directs the annual Summer Program and Advanced Study Institute in Cultural Psychiatry at McGill. He also founded and directs the Network for Aboriginal Mental Health Research. His past research includes studies on cultural consultation, pathways and barriers to mental health care for immigrants and refugees, somatization in primary care, cultural concepts of mental health and illness in Inuit communities, risk and protective factors for suicide among Inuit youth, and resilience among Indigenous peoples. Current projects include: mental health promotion for Indigenous youth; the integration of ethnography and neuroscience in global mental health; and models of mental health services for multicultural societies.
More info at https://www.mcgill.ca/tcpsych/faculty/laurencekirmayer
Brandon Kohrt, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences; Charles and Sonia Akman Professor in Global Psychiatry, George Washington University
Brandon Kohrt, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences; Charles and Sonia Akman Professor in Global Psychiatry, George Washington University
As an internationally recognized global mental health expert, he works with populations affected by war-related trauma, torture, environmental disasters, and chronic stressor of poverty, discrimination, and lack of access to healthcare. Dr. Kohrt has worked in Nepal since 1996 and has been advisor to Transcultural Psychosocial Organization (TPO) Nepal since 2006. He has collaborated with The Carter Center Mental Health Program in Liberia since 2010. He has investigated the mental health consequences of and designed interventions for child soldiers and earthquake survivors in Nepal. He collaborated on development of a Nepali school-based youth suicide prevention program. In Liberia, he designed programs to reduce stigma among youth and adults impacted by mental illness, political violence, and the Ebola virus outbreak, and co-designed a Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) program for police officers. He has collaborated on interventions for children with Nodding Syndrome in Uganda and children affected by HIV and political violence in Nigeria. In addition, he has worked in Uganda, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Mongolia, Haiti and India. Dr. Kohrt has published over 100 peer reviewed articles and book chapters. He co-edited the book Global Mental Health: Anthropological Perspectives, which was honored with the creative scholarship award of the Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture. He has received research funding from NIMH, Grand Challenges Canada, UNICEF, the Fulbright Program, HopeLab, and the Jacobs Foundation. His clinical work addresses cross-cultural psychiatry specializing in refugees and immigrant populations. He founded the Atlanta Asylum Network for Torture Survivors and consults on suicide prevention programs for Bhutanese Nepali refugees. Dr. Kohrt has developed a global mental health training program in Nepal for students in medicine, public health, and anthropology.
More info at https://www.gwdocs.com/find-a-doctor/brandon-kohrt-md-phd/
Roberto Lewis-Fernández, MD, Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons and Director of the New York State (NYS) Center of Excellence for Cultural Competence and the Hispanic Treatment Program, and Co-Director of the Anxiety Disorders Clinic, at NYS Psychiatric Institute
Roberto Lewis-Fernández, MD, Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons and Director of the New York State (NYS) Center of Excellence for Cultural Competence and the Hispanic Treatment Program
Dr. Roberto Lewis-Fernández is Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons and Director of the New York State (NYS) Center of Excellence for Cultural Competence and the Hispanic Treatment Program, and Co-Director of the Anxiety Disorders Clinic, at NYS Psychiatric Institute. He is also Lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard University.
Dr. Lewis-Fernández’s research focuses on developing clinical interventions and novel service-delivery approaches to help overcome disparities in the care of underserved cultural groups. His work centers on improving treatment engagement and retention in mental health and physical health care by persons with anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, and other serious mental illnesses. He also studies the way culture affects individuals’ experience of mental disorder and their help-seeking expectations, including how to explore this cultural variation during the psychiatric evaluation. He led the development of the DSM-5 Cultural Formulation Interview, a standardized method for cultural assessment for use in mental health practice, and the Principal Investigator of its international field trial, conducted in Canada, India, Kenya, the Netherlands, Peru, and the United States. Dr. Lewis-Fernández’s research has been funded by US federal and state agencies as well as private foundations. He has published over 170 articles, editorials, commentaries, reports, books, and book chapters on the topic of cultural mental health.
More info at https://www.columbiapsychiatry.org/profile/roberto-lewis-fernandez-md
Michael Lifshitz, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University
Michael Lifshitz, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University
I am interested in the plasticity of human consciousness. My research investigates practices that aim to transform subjective experience—from meditation and hypnosis to placebos, prayer, and contemplative therapies. I work from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining cognitive, neurobiological, and phenomenological approaches to shed light on mechanisms of self-regulation in both health and pathology.
I completed my PhD in neuroscience at McGill University and am currently working with Tanya M. Luhrmann as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford. My work has been supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Bial Foundation, and the Mind & Life Institute. Before my doctorate, I completed a master’s in neuroscience and an undergraduate with honours in psychology and minors in philosophy and world religions, all at McGill.
Tanya Luhrmann, PhD, Watkins University Professor, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University
Tanya Luhrmann, PhD, Watkins University Professor, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University
Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department. Her work focuses on the edge of experience: on voices, visions, the world of the supernatural and the world of psychosis. She has done ethnography on the streets of Chicago with homeless and psychotic women, and worked with people who hear voices in Chennai, Accra and the South Bay. She has also done fieldwork with evangelical Christians who seek to hear God speak back, with Zoroastrians who set out to create a more mystical faith, and with people who practice magic. She uses a combination of ethnographic and experimental methods to understand the phenomenology of unusual sensory experiences, the way they are shaped by ideas about minds and persons, and what we can learn from this social shaping that can help us to help those whose voices are distressing.
She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and received a John Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2007.When God Talks Back was named a NYT Notable Book of the Year and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year. Her new book, Our Most Troubling Madness: Schizophrenia and Culture, will be published by the University of California Press in 2016.
More info at https://anthropology.stanford.edu/people/tanya-marie-luhrmann
Sonia Lupien, PhD, Full Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of Montreal
Sonia Lupien, PhD, Full Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of Montreal
Sonia Lupien is interested in the effects of stress throughout life and has conducted studies in children and young adults. Her studies have shown that even children are vulnerable to the e ffects of stress, and some of them secrete high levels of stress hormones from 6 years old onwards. Her studies in young adults led her to demonstrate the acute and chronic effects of stress hormones on memory and emotional regulation. Finally, studies on elderly populations have shown the negative effects of chronic stress on the hippocampus, a region involved in learning and memory processes.
Among her new research projects, she is interested in the sex and gender differences in the reactivity to stress and in the effects on memory and emotion regulation. She developed the DeStress for Success program that aims at educating children and teenagers on stress and its impact on learning and memory. Her team is currently actively working to adapt the DeStress Program towards adults in workplace environments. She is also the director of the Centre for Studies on Human Stress that aims to educate the public about the effects of stress on the brain and body by using scientifically validated data.
More info at http://www.iusmm.ca/research/researchers/researchers/sonia-lupien.html
Carolyn Parkinson, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, UCLA
Carolyn Parkinson, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, UCLA
I’m interested in how the human brain represents, navigates, and shapes its social environment. My research integrates theory and methods from social psychology with computational techniques that exploit the wealth of information contained in patterns of ties in real-world social networks and in distributed patterns of brain activity.
My current work is primarily concerned with better understanding the mental architecture involved in encoding the structure of our social networks, and the cognitive and behavioral consequences of this structure. By combining the systematic characterization of real-world social relationships with methods for assessing information processing within individual brains, this line of research aims to provide insight into interactions between social networks and human cognition.
More info at https://www.psych.ucla.edu/faculty/page/cparkinson
Maxwell Ramstead, PhD candidate, Department of Philosophy and Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University
Maxwell Ramstead, PhD candidate, Department of Philosophy and Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University
I am a Ph.D. candidate at McGill University, affiliated with the Department of Philosophy and the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging of University College London. I have completed my B.A. in Philosophy at Université de Montréal and my M.A. in Philosophy (specialized in Cognitive Science) at Université du Québec à Montréal. My research explores active inference and multiscale explanation in psychiatry, cognitive sciences, and computational neurosciences. I am grateful that my Ph.D. research project, entitled Have We Lost Our Minds?, is supported by the Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives initiative at McGill.
More info at http://mcgill.academia.edu/MaxwellJamesDRamstead
Amir Raz, PhD, ABPH, Professor, Director, Institute for Interdisciplinary Brain and Behavioral Sciences, Chapman University; Canada Research Chair in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention at both the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University and the SMBD Jewish General Hospital
Amir Raz, PhD, ABPH, Professor, Director, Institute for Interdisciplinary Brain and Behavioral Sciences, Chapman University; Canada Research Chair in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention at both the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University and the SMBD Jewish General Hospital
He received his PhD in computation and information processing in the brain from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He went on to be a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Michael I. Posner at the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology of the Weill Medical College of Cornell University. He was then appointed to the position of Assistant Professor at Cornell University and subsequently at Columbia University in the City of New York. He is the recipient of multiple accolades, including the 2006 Young Investigator Award from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Affective Disorders and the 2005 Early Career Award from the American Psychological Association (Division 30). Professor Raz is a diplomate of the American Board of Psychological Hypnosis. Having examined the safety and efficacy of psychiatric drugs across development, his active research interests span the neural and psychological substrates of attention, self-regulation, expectation, placebo, and consciousness. He is also conducting research into developmental psychopathology, the cognitive neuroscience of culture, authorship processes and atypical cognition. Using neuroimaging and other state-of-the-art techniques, his research elucidates the relationship between disparate attention networks and attentional planes such as hypnosis.
Jeffrey G. Snodgrass, PhD, Professor, Department of Anthropology, Colorado State University
Jeffrey G. Snodgrass, PhD, Professor, Department of Anthropology, Colorado State University
I am a critical psychiatric anthropologist, who investigates the social foundations of mental well-being and the bio-psycho-cultural therapeutics of ritual and play. I am especially interested to understand how human health and healing processes function in natural and (technologically) built environments experiencing dramatic change and high risk and uncertainty. My research suggests that local therapies and sources of health resilience are especially important in such contexts and as such should be incorporated more fully into the global mental health agenda.
I direct the Ethnographic Research and Teaching Lab (ERTL), which gets students involved in my ongoing collaborative research. In my lab, I merge research and teaching in ways that aim to move the field of cultural anthropology beyond the “lone ethnographer” approach (see my recent Nov. 2016 contribution to the Annals of Anthropological Practice).
More info at https://anthropology.colostate.edu/author/jsnodgra/
Samuel Veissière, PhD, Assistant Professor, Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry; Co-Director, Culture, Mind, and Brain Program, McGill University
Samuel Veissière, PhD, Assistant Professor, Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry; Co-Director, Culture, Mind, and Brain Program, McGill University
An anthropologist and cognitive scientist by training, Samuel Veissière is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Associate member in the Department of Anthropology, and co-director of the Culture, Mind, and Brain program at McGill University. He specializes in social and cultural dimensions of cognition, attention, and mental health from evolutionary and ecological (niche construction) perspectives. His current research spans various topics from cultural factors in hypnosis, suggestion, and placebo therapeutics, hyper-sociality in smartphone addiction, variational (free-energy) approaches to the evolution of cognition and culture, and agent-based modeling of joint-intentionality and complex social processes.
More info at https://www.mcgill.ca/tcpsych/faculty/samuel-paul-louis-veissiere