About the Editors
Principal Editor
William A. Carlezon Jr., Ph.D.
William A. Carlezon Jr., Ph.D., is the founding editor of NPP-Digital Psychiatry and Neuroscience. He manages the overall function of the journal and handles manuscripts across all of the subject areas. He is Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School and holds the Jerry and Phyllis Rappaport Chair in Psychiatry at McLean Hospital, where he serves as Chief of the Basic Neuroscience Division. His research focuses on examining how stress affects the brain and peripheral organs, increasingly utilizing translationally-relevant testing procedures and endpoints in preclinical models that are the same as those that can be obtained in humans from digital devices (e.g., sleep, heart rate, circadian rhythms of activity and body temperature). He has received numerous awards for his research, including Independent Investigator Awards from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD), the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from George W. Bush, the Jacob P. Waletzky Memorial Award for Innovative Research in Drug Addiction and Alcoholism from the Society for Neuroscience (SfN), and the Daniel H. Efron Research Award from the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP). He is an honorary fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a fellow of the ACNP, and served as Principal Editor of Neuropsychopharmacology (NPP) from 2013-2022.
Senior Editors
Justin Baker, M.D., Ph.D.
Justin Baker, M.D., Ph.D. is a member of the scientific team that founded NPP-Digital Psychiatry and Neuroscience, and he is a Senior Editor who handles manuscripts focusing on Computational Approaches. He is the scientific director of the McLean Institute for Technology in Psychiatry (ITP) and director of the Laboratory for Functional Neuroimaging and Bioinformatics at McLean Hospital. He is also an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Baker’s research uses both large-scale studies and deep, multilevel phenotyping approaches to understand the nature and underlying biology of mental illnesses. He is a clinical psychiatrist with expertise in schizophrenia and bipolar spectrum disorders and other disorders of emerging adulthood. In 2016, Dr. Baker co-founded the ITP, a first-of-its-kind research and development center to foster tool development and novel applications of consumer technology in psychiatric research and care delivery.
Brenda Curtis, Ph.D.
Brenda Curtis, Ph.D. is a member of the scientific team that founded NPP-Digital Psychiatry and Neuroscience, and she is a Senior Editor who handles manuscripts focusing on Devices and Apps. She is an Investigator (Tenure-Track) within the Translational Addiction Medicine Branch (TAMB) at the NIDA Intramural Research Program where she leads a cutting-edge clinical research program as the Principal Investigator of the Technology and Translational Research Unit. Her research focus is translational, leveraging big data methodology to form the development, evaluation, and implementation of technology-based tools that address substance use and related conditions. She uses this methodology to facilitate the flow of scientific discovery to practical application allowing one to not only reach under-served populations, but to design health monitoring and behavioral change interventions that are user-centered, inclusive, and evidence-based. Her research focuses on the use of digital platforms to understand and promote positive health behaviors; adapting and integrating technology based interventions in treatment settings; the recruitment and retention of diverse populations into research studies; and preventing stigmatization in SUD treatment. Currently, she is co-chair of the NIH Stigma Scientific Interest Group; a board member of the Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research (PRIMR); and a NIH Distinguished Scholar. One of the main research tracks of her lab is on the impact of health disparities, stigma, and implicit biases on addiction treatment and recovery. Using big data methodologies that include multivariable models using data from ecological momentary assessment (EMA), digital phenotyping, and language, they examine the roles that race, gender, and stigma play in recovery and treatment outcomes.
Sam Golden, Ph.D.
Sam Golden, Ph.D. is a member of the scientific team that founded NPP-Digital Psychiatry and Neuroscience, and he is a Senior Editor who handles manuscripts focusing on Studies in Animals. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Structure at the University of Washington and participating faculty in the UW Center for Excellence in the Neurobiology of Addiction, Pain, and Emotion (UW NAPE Center). He completed his Ph.D. degree at the Icahn School of Medicine in New York City, NY in 2015 and then his postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) in Baltimore, MD in 2018. Dr. Golden’s research program focuses on understanding the neural mechanisms and circuits guiding motivated behavior, with a special interest in affiliative and aggressive social motivation and their intersection with neuropsychiatric disease. His lab commonly integrates the use of chemogenetics, optogenetics, calcium imaging, electrophysiological recording, and whole-mount light-sheet fluorescent microscopy approaches into translational preclinical models. The Golden Lab is known for the development and support of Simple Behavioral Analysis (SimBA), an innovative open-source software package designed for non-specialists. This tool is widely used to generate supervised and unsupervised machine-learning-based classification of complex behavior, emphasizing transparency and explainability of predictions, making it accessible to a broad range of researchers.
Sofiya Hupalo, Ph.D.
Sofiya Hupalo, Ph.D., is a member of the scientific team that founded NPP-Digital Psychiatry and Neuroscience, and she is a Senior Editor who manages Social Media. She is a Program Officer in the Division of Neuroscience and Basic Behavioral Science at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). She first joined NIMH as an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow, where she has since supported a portfolio of basic and preclinical research grants aiming to develop novel therapeutic targets and treatment candidates for mental illness. She also leads initiatives that support development of behavioral and neurophysiological assays that can be used to evaluate targets and predict clinical effects in a therapeutic development pipeline. Dr. Hupalo earned her Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and conducted postdoctoral training in the Intramural Research Program at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), during which her work was supported by independent fellowships from NIMH and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS). Her research examined how neuromodulators and mutations in psychiatric disease risk genes disrupt function of neural circuits that support working memory and attention, toward the broader goal of understanding pathophysiological processes that contribute to mental illness.
Chloe Jordan, Ph.D.
Chloe Jordan, Ph.D., is a member of the scientific team that founded NPP-Digital Psychiatry and Neuroscience, and she is a Senior Editor who manages Special Features. She is a Scientific Program Manager in the Division of Extramural Research at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH). At NIDA, Dr. Jordan coordinates the HEALthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) Study, the largest, long-term study of early brain and child development in the United States. Dr. Jordan earned her Ph.D. in Psychological & Brain Sciences from Boston University in 2015, and completed her post-doctoral training at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School and the NIDA Intramural Research Program from 2015-2019. Her post-doctoral work focused on developmental risk factors and translational biomarkers for substance use and new medication development for opioid and stimulant use disorders. Following her post-doctoral training, Dr. Jordan served as a Scientific Program Manager for the planning phase of the HBCD Study and thereafter as a Project Director of a NIDA Clinical Trials Network study on opioid use disorder pharmacotherapy. She was also the inaugural editorial intern and subsequently the Special Projects Manager of Neuropsychopharmacology (NPP) from 2018-2022.
Catherine Jensen Peña, Ph.D.
Catherine Jensen Peña, Ph.D., is a member of the scientific team that founded NPP-Digital Psychiatry and Neuroscience, and she is a Senior Editor who handles manuscripts focusing on Molecular Approaches. She is an Assistant Professor in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. Her lab investigates how early life adversity impacts brain development, behavior, and risk for psychiatric disease via enduring transcriptional and epigenetic mechanisms using a variety of ‘omics’ tools and computational analyses. She earned her BA from the University of Pennsylvania, her PhD from Columbia University, and completed postdoctoral work at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
John Torous, M.D., M.B.I.
John Torous, M.D., M.B.I., is a member of the scientific team that founded NPP-Digital Psychiatry and Neuroscience, and he is a Senior Editor who handles manuscripts focusing on Studies in Humans. He is director of the digital psychiatry division, in the Department of Psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BDIMC), a Harvard Medical School affiliated teaching hospital, where he also serves as a staff psychiatrist and assistant professor. He has a background in electrical engineering and computer sciences and received an undergraduate degree in the field from UC Berkeley before attending medical school at UC San Diego. He completed his psychiatry residency, fellowship in clinical informatics, and master's degree in biomedical informatics at Harvard. Dr. Torous is active in investigating the potential of mobile mental health technologies for psychiatry and has published over 250 peer reviewed articles and 5 book chapters on the topic. He directs the Digital Psychiatry Clinic at BIDMC which seeks to improve access to and quality of mental health care through augmenting treatment with digital innovations. Dr. Torous also serves as editor-in-chief for the journal JMIR Mental Health, web editor for JAMA Psychiatry, and currently chairs the American Psychiatric Association’s Health IT Committee.
Margaux Kenwood, Ph.D
Margaux Kenwood, Ph.D., is a member of the scientific team that founded NPP-Digital Psychiatry and Neuroscience, and she is the inaugural Editorial Intern. She completed her PhD under the guidance of Dr. Kalin at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, using a highly translationally relevant nonhuman primate model to elucidate the neural circuitry underling early temperamental anxiety, a risk factor that, in humans, predisposes for the later development of stress-related psychopathology. Dr. Kenwood now works with Dr. Conor Liston at Weill Cornell, using high dimensional phenotyping of animals living in social groups under naturalistic conditions, with the hopes of leveraging technology to better understand individual phenotypic variability as it relates to stress susceptibility. She also values the importance of outreach and served as the BRAD 2021-2022 Fellow, a venture partially sponsored by the ACNP.
ACNP-related Staff
Lori Kunath
Lori Kunath played a key role in launching NPP-Digital Psychiatry and Neuroscience, and she is the inaugural Editorial Manager.
Efrata Tecle
Efrata Tecle is the NPP-Digital Psychiatry and Neuroscience Editorial Assistant.
Jennifer Mahar
Jennifer Mahar played a key role in launching NPP-Digital Psychiatry and Neuroscience, and she is the inaugural Peer Review Manager.
Springer Nature Staff
Susan Ciambrano
Susan Ciambrano played a key role in launching NPP-Digital Psychiatry and Neuroscience, and she is the inaugural Executive Publisher.
Taylor Custis
Taylor Custis played a key role in launching NPP-Digital Psychiatry and Neuroscience, and she is the inaugural Editorial Assistant.
