About the Editors

Editor-in-Chief

Julio Licinio, MD, PhD, MBA, MS

Julio Licinio, MD, PhD, MBA, MS, FRANZCP, FAAHMS, is State University of New York (SUNY) Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry, Pharmacology, Medicine, and Neuroscience & Physiology at SUNY Upstate Medical University (UMU). He was Senior Vice President for Academic and Health Affairs, and Executive Dean, College of Medicine at SUNY UMU in 2017-2019. He is also Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. Prior to joining Upstate in 2017, he was Deputy Director for Translational Research and Head, Mind-Brain Theme at the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute, and previously he was Director of the John Curtin School of Medical Research, Australian National University. Dr. Licinio was Chair of Psychiatry at University of Miami (2006-2009) and prior to that, he was at UCLA (1999-2006), where he was Center Director and Vice-Chair of Psychiatry. Dr. Licinio had clinical and research training in endocrinology and psychiatry at University of Chicago and Cornell. He is recognized internationally as a leader in translational research in depression and obesity. He has had academic apointments for over 25 years at Yale, NIH, UCLA, University of Miami, SUNY, and in Australia, where he has had key leadership positions. He is also founding Editor of three Springer Nature journals, Molecular Psychiatry, Translational Psychiatry, and The Pharmacogenomics Journal. He has most recently served as a member of the New York State Governor’s Suicide Prevention Task Force, representing SUNY. 

Associate Editors

Agorastos Agorastos, MD, MSc, PhD, CCBT 

Dr. Agorastos is Assist. Professor of Psychiatry at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and International Partner of the VA Center of Excellence for Stress and Mental Health (CESAMH) at the University of California, San Diego (USCD), La Jolla, USA. He previously served as Assoc. Professor of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University of Hamburg, Head of the Outpatient Psychiatric Services of the University Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy in Hamburg, and Team Leader of the Psychoneuroimmunology and Psychoneurophysiology Research Group of the Laboratory of Biological Psychiatry in the Hamburg University Medical Center. He received his MD at the Medical University of Vienna, completed his doctorate, clinical and psychotherapeutic training (Board Approval for CBT) and professorial thesis at the University of Hamburg, his MSc in Affective Neuroscience at the Universities of Maastricht and Florence and his Postdoc Fellowship at the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) research group of the CESAMH at USCD. Fields of clinical expertise include stress- and trauma-related disorders, anxiety disorders, OCD and treatment-resistant/post-partum depression, while his current research focus centers in the neurobiology of stress and stress-related disorders with particular emphasis on psychoneuroendocrinology, -immunology and -physiology of stress, PTSD and depression and their neuropsychological correlates, as well as on the circadian system and chronodisruption as vital components of neuropsychiatric disease development. Dr. Agorastos has received a large number of international scholarships, awards, honors and certifications, is active member of >10 international professional societies, has served as ad hoc reviewer in >30 international scientific journals and currently serves as Section Editor, Associate Editor, Guest Editor and Editorial Board Member in several international scientific Journals. According to Expertscape (2020), Dr. Agorastos has been listed as Expert among the top 1% cited scientists of the world in all four categories of his research focus: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Autonomic Nervous System, Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis and Circadian Rhythms.

Andre F. Carvalho, M.D., Ph.D

Andre F. Carvalho, M.D., Ph.D., is a psychiatrist who specializes in affective disorders and evidence-based mental health. He was an associate professor at the University of Toronto. Currently he works as a senior research scientist in the IMPACT (Innovation in Mental and Physical Health and Clinical Treatment) Strategic Research Centre at the School of Medicine at Deakin University. Dr. Carvalho sits on the editorial boards of several prestigious periodicals and has over 500 peer-reviewed publications. His work has been presented at several international meetings. Dr Carvalho is an after sought speaker and is also an ISI Clarivate Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher in the fields of Psychology/Psychiatry.

Revathy Uthaiah Chottekalapanda, PhD

Revathy Uthaiah Chottekalapanda is a Senior Research Associate in The Laboratory of Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience at The Rockefeller University. She received her postdoctoral training in The Laboratory of Sensory Neuroscience at The Rockefeller University, and her PhD in Genetics from the University of Köln and Max Planck Institute Dortmund, Germany, and a Junior Research fellowship at the National Center for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, India. She earned her BS in Biology (Honors) from Bangalore University, India; MS in Microbiology and Molecular Biology from Mysore University, India. Dr. Chottekalapanda is a recipient of several awards: Royal Society of Chemistry Award for an essay on Antibiotic Resistance (1994); Junior Research Fellowship from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) (1998), India; International Graduate Program Doctoral Fellowship by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; Germany (1999-2004); Women & Science Postdoctoral Fellowship from The Rockefeller University (2006); NARSAD Young Investigator Award (2015-2017) from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. Dr. Chottekalapanda serves in the editorial board of Molecular Psychiatry and is an Associate Editor for Translational Psychiatry. Her research focuses on the role of neuron-glia signaling mechanisms in the regulation of complex behaviors, with a specific focus on mood dysregulation and discovery.

Jamie Feusner, MD

Dr. Feusner is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto in the Division of Neurosciences & Clinical Translation, Clinician Scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health where he directs the Brain, Body, and Perception Research Program, and Foreign Adjunct Professor at the Karolinska Institute. Dr. Feusner was previously Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA from 2006-2021 where he directed the UCLA Eating Disorders and Body Dysmorphic Disorder Research Program and the UCLA Adult OCD Program.

Dr. Feusner is a member of the Eating Disorder Research Society and the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. He is also an elected Board Member of the International College of Obsessive Compulsive Spectrum Disorders, a member of the International OCD Foundation Scientific and Clinical Advisory Board, and a member of the International OCD Accreditation Task Force.

Dr. Feusner's clinical neuroscience research seeks to understand the brain basis of perception, emotion, and reward across conditions involving body image and obsessions and compulsions. He also studies gender identity and own body perception for improving health outcomes of gender-affirming treatments. Dr. Feusner's research utilizes functional and structural neuroimaging, psychophysical testing, and neuromodulation to understand the brain and behavior, as well as multivariate machine learning predictive models of clinical outcomes. He has also created novel digital applications to assess and quantify body and appearance perception. Dr. Feusner's seminal research includes the first functional neuroimaging studies in body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), the first studies to directly compare the neurobiology of BDD to anorexia nervosa, and pre-translational research investigating visual perceptual modulation using behavioral and TMS approaches to improve body image distortions. Dr. Feusner’s pioneering functional brain imaging studies in BDD discovered that distorted perception of appearance is related to aberrant visual processing. His later research uncovered similar abnormalities in visual processing in anorexia nervosa. Dr. Feusner has been funded continuously by the NIH and foundation grants since 2007 and his research has been featured on BBC, CNN, NBC, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Nature, and Scientific American Mind.

Alexios-Fotios A. Mentis, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H.

Dr. Alexios-Fotios A. Mentis is a physician, public health scientist, and genomics specialist, as well as an alumnus of Johns Hopkins University. He has published more than 70 papers in several fields and many in high-impact journals, including Science, Nature Medicine, Molecular Psychiatry, and BMC Medicine. He has also served as Technical Expert for the World Health Organization. His research interests have focused on the intersections between clinical neurosciences, precision medicine, preventive neuropsychiatry, and meta-research. He has been an Onassis Foundation Scholar and has received several awards for his work. He served as scientific collaborator at the University Research Institute on Maternal and Child Health and Precision Medicine in Athens, Greece until early 2022. 

Scott J. Moeller, PhD

Scott J. Moeller received his undergraduate degree from Stony Brook University Honors College in 2005 and his PhD from the University of Michigan in 2010, both in Psychology. He then began postdoctoral training in addiction neuroimaging at Brookhaven National Laboratory, finishing his training at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in 2013. After holding an Assistant Professor position at Mount Sinai from 2013-2017, he was recruited to the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University in 2017 for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position, where he also serves as Associate Vice Chair for Clinical Research.  

Dr. Moeller investigates the neurobiological bases of impaired cognitive and emotional functioning in human drug addiction. His earlier work was conducted primarily in cocaine use disorder, but more recently he has begun studying opioid use disorder. Much of his research involves what can be termed “self-reflective” or “Type 2” cognition, referring to self-awareness of one’s executive functioning (as distinct from the executive functioning itself). More specifically, he uses fMRI and other imaging tools to probe the brain circuits underlying problems with metacognition (“thinking about thinking”) and clinical insight (awareness of illness severity and need for treatment), with the ultimate treatment goal to improve self-awareness and therapeutic engagement among addicted individuals. Another research interest centers around improving our understanding of central and peripheral stress systems in addiction and the role of stress as a trigger for relapse. Finally, he has started to link these more cognitive mechanisms to molecular mechanisms afforded by positron emission tomography (PET) imaging, allowing him to connect these different system levels to uncover new therapeutic targets.  

Dr. Moeller’s research has culminated in more than 60 peer-reviewed original articles and reviews. For this work, he has received multiple grants as PI from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), including an F32 Postdoctoral Fellowship, a K01 Research Scientist Development Award, and multiple R01 and R21 Research Project Grants. He is currently an Associate Editor for Translational Psychiatry and Frontiers in Psychiatry (Addictive Disorders section), and he is on the Editorial Boards of American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse and Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology.

Joao Quevedo, MD, PhD

João Quevedo, MD, PhD concluded his MD in 1998, his residency training in Psychiatry in 2000, his fellowship in Psychopharmacology in 2001 and his PhD in Biological Sciences (Biochemistry) in 2002, all from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.

After being Faculty for almost 15 years at The University of Southern Santa Catarina (UNESC) in Brazil where he hold several positions including Dean of the Medical School, he moved to the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, McGovern Medical School, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) in 2014. Over there he now serves as Professor, Vice-Chair for Faculty Development and Outreach, Director of the Translational Psychiatry Program and Director of the Treatment-Resistant Depression Clinic. He is also Professor at the Neuroscience Graduate Program, The University of Texas MD Anderson UTHeatlh Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. He is still Adjunct Professor and Director of the Translational Psychiatry Laboratory at the Graduate Program in Health Sciences, at his former brazilian university, The University of Southern Santa Catarina. Dr. Joao Quevedo also serves as Editor-in-Chief for the Brazilian Journal of Psychiatry and Associate Editor for Translational Psychiatry.

He has been involved in research since 1994, while still in Medical School. As a medical student he was a research fellow in the laboratory of Prof.  Ivan A. Izquierdo, the most important scientist in Brazil at that time. In 1996 he published his first research paper focused on the neurobiology of learning and memory, area to which he devoted himself until shortly after the completion of his PhD He was gradually shifting his research interest to the neurobiology of psychiatric disorders, particularly mood disorders. Dr. João Quevedo became a specialist in major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder, both as clinician and researcher. As clinician he has been working with treatment-resistant patients managing complex differential diagnosis and personalized treatment strategies. As researcher he has been making important contributions in understanding the pathophysiology of these diseases as well developing experimental treatments that can be used in the clinic in the near future.

Kim Q. Do, PhD

In 1999, she moved towards "bench to bed" research at the Center for Psychiatric Neuroscience. She set up a translational research program aimed at a better understanding of the causes and mechanisms leading to schizophrenia phenotypes in order to develop markers for early diagnosis, new drug targets as well as preventive and therapeutic measures. Building on an innovative hypothesis, her work pioneered the involvement of a pathophysiological “hub” in which oxidative stress/redox dysregulation interacts with NMDAR hypofunction, neuroinflammation and dopamine imbalance, leading to the impairment of neural connectivity and synchronization, and to cognitive deficits as observed in patients. Based on relevant neurobiological data, she spearheaded several clinical studies, paving the way for promising biomarker guided treatment of patients in the early stages of psychosis

Dr. Do's research has been supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Human Frontier Science Program, NIH, as well as various institutions and foundations of the private sector in Switzerland and abroad. She received the NARSAD Independent Investigator Award from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (USA) in 2006, the NARSAD Distinguished Investigator Award in 2010 and, in 2018, the SIRS Outstanding Basic Science Award from the Schizophrenia International Research Society as well as the Elsevier Senior Schizophrenia Research Award from the American publisher Elsevier.

She authored over 350 publications and also serves on the Editorial Boards of the International Journal for Neuropsychopharmacology, NPJ Schizophrenia, Molecular Psychiatry, Journal of Psychiatry and Mental Health, and Discover Mental Health.

Muhammad A. Parvaz, PhD