Session 2

Breaking Barriers: The Future of Non-Invasive Neuromodulation for Mental Health

Thursday, May 1st from 11:40a - 1:10p

Session Chair

Alexander Opitz, PhD

Associate Professor, Biomedical Engineering, University of Minnesota

"Leveraging mechanism to unlock TMS potential"

Joshua Brown, MD, PhD

Assistant Professor, Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, McLean Hospital

Joshua Brown, MD, PhD serves as the medical director of the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) Service and director of TMS research within the Division of Depression and Anxiety Disorders at McLean Hospital. He is also an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and leads the Brain Stimulation Mechanisms Laboratory at McLean. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the newly established Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, a journal of the Clinical TMS Society, also serving as President-Elect of this society. His research focuses on elucidating synaptic-level mechanisms of rTMS, aiming to optimize treatment parameters and augmentation strategies. Utilizing neurophysiology, neuroimaging, and neurobehavioral tasks, he investigates TMS effects in conjunction with receptor-modulating drugs in human subjects. His work seeks to enhance understanding and application of TMS, potentially broadening its therapeutic efficacy across neurological and psychiatric conditions.

"Translational mechanisms and brain-state precision in TMS"

Ivan Alekseichuk, PhD

Assistant Professor, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Northwestern University

Dr. Alekseichuk is an assistant professor and the head of the Precision Neuromodulation Lab at Northwestern University, Chicago. He completed his postdoctoral training at the University of Minnesota Department of Biomedical Engineering, Minneapolis, where he also worked as a research scientist in the Alexander Opitz lab on brain stimulation mechanisms. Ivan Alekseichuk defended his doctoral degree in 2017 in systems neuroscience at the University of Göttingen, Germany.

"Mapping causal cortical-subcortical pathways using multimodal concurrent brain stimulation-recording methods in humans"

Jing Jiang, PhD

Assistant Professor, Carver College of Medicine, University of Iowa

Dr. Jing Jiang is an Assistant Professor in the Stead Family Department of Pediatrics and Department of Psychiatry at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. She earned her Ph.D. in Psychology from Humboldt University of Berlin & Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany, followed by postdoctoral trainings in affective and network neuroscience at Stanford University and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Jiang’s lab currently focuses on combining multimodal brain ‘perturbation’ methods—including intracranial electrical stimulation, TMS, and lesion network mapping—with multimodal brain recordings, such as intracranial EEG and functional MRI, to better understand the neural circuits underlying neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders. Her research has been published in high-profile journals such as Biological Psychiatry, PNAS, Neuropsychopharmacology, and Journal of Neuroscience. She has received an R01 grant from the NIH and a NARSAD Young Investigator grant from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation. Additionally, she was selected as a Rising Star at the Society of Biological Psychiatry's Annual Meeting.

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