About the Editors
Editor-in-Chief
Jack Tsai, PhD
Campus Dean and Professor of Public Health
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston; Yale University School of Medicine
Houston, TX, USA
Dr. Tsai serves as Campus Dean and Professor of Public Health at UTHealth and Research Director for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, National Center on Homelessness among Veterans. He holds an adjunct faculty appointment at Yale University where he served on faculty for a decade. Dr. Tsai is a clinical psychologist who focuses on the mental health and social well-being of diverse groups and is interested in science that improves understanding and services for mental illness.
Senior Managing Editor
Viki Hurst, PhD
Senior Managing Editor
Springer Nature, London, UK
Viki obtained her PhD in animal behaviour and psychopharmacology at Newcastle University and did postdoctoral work at the University of Sheffield investigating treatments in animal models of cancer-induced bone pain. She later worked for a UK research funder where she developed resources to improve the experimental design and reporting of in vivo research. Viki has several years’ experience in OA publishing, first as an Editor for Scientific Data, and is now Senior Managing Editor at the npj series. Viki is based in the Springer Nature London office.
Associate Editors
Umair Akram, PhD
Senior Lecturer, School of Psychology
University of Lincoln
Lincoln, UK
Dr. Akram specializes in behavioral sleep medicine, with a particular focus on insomnia. Umair completed their doctoral-level study at Northumbria University, exploring cognitive processes underlying insomnia before completing the Postgraduate Diploma in Sleep Medicine at the University of Oxford. Currently a senior lecturer in Psychology at the University of Lincoln, Umair’s work explores the cognitive and behavioral factors underlying insomnia, with an emphasis on selective attention, self-perception of facial cues, body image disturbances, self-disgust, and emotion recognition. In addition, his work involves the identification of modifiable risk factors in relation to student mental health difficulties and the possible therapeutic benefits of internet memes related to psychiatric symptoms.
Cody Chiuzan, PhD
Associate Professor
Institute of Health System Science, Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, Northwell Health
New York, NY, USA
Dr. Chiuzan is a biostatistician with substantive expertise in clinical trial and observational study designs. In her previous role, she was an assistant professor in the Department of Biostatistics at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, where she also served as co-director of the Fee-for-Service Consulting Service and associate director of Education of the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA)—Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design (BERD).
Her research area focuses on development of adaptive clinical trial designs and application of methods using real-world data sources (i.e., electronic health records, registries) to enhance future clinical trials by gaining a more comprehensive description of the target populations, exploring the potential use of synthetic control arms (versus standard controls), and by employing causal inference methodology to guide the transfer of knowledge among non-experimental studies.
Elizabeth H. Connors, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry
Yale University School of Medicine
New Haven, CT, USA
Dr. Connors’ research focuses on identifying and testing effective implementation strategies to promote the increased use of evidence-based mental health practices in “usual care” children’s mental health services. She currently studies evidence-based practices such as 1) measurement-based care to drive person-centered, data-driven treatment; and 2) trauma-informed practices in schools to promote student and staff resilience from chronic stress and adversity. As schools are the primary child-serving sector of mental health services in the U.S., Dr. Connors specializes in mental health-education integration to increase access to high quality mental health promotion, prevention, early intervention and treatment for students in schools. As a Child-Clinical and Community Psychologist, Dr. Connors uses participatory methods in community-partnered and stakeholder-informed research and quality improvement strategies to effect sustainable systems change.
David Coyle, PhD
Associate Professor, School of Computer Science
University College Dublin
Dublin, Ireland
Dr Coyle is an Associate Professor with the School of Computer Science at University College Dublin. His research focuses on Human Computer-Interaction (HCI) and Digital Mental Health, with an emphasis on the design of technology to support the assessment, prevention and treatment of mental health difficulties. This work has included the development of online interventions for adults, technology enabled interventions for young people, and specialist interventions for adults with intellectual disabilities. Dr Coyle has previously led a large-scale, European PhD training network focusing on digital mental health interventions for young people. His approach is highly interdisciplinary, drawing on methods from computer science, clinical and cognitive psychology.
Sinan Gülöksüz, MD, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Neuropsychology
Maastricht University Medical Center
Maastricht, The Netherlands
With a background in clinical psychiatry and epidemiology, Dr. Gülöksüz’s primary research focus has been on understanding the mechanisms underlying mental health outcomes by investigating the contribution of exposome and genome to multidimensional cognitive and behavioral phenotypes in the general population cohorts and large case-control samples. The second body of his work has been in the areas of service research and clinical trials of psychosis spectrum disorder.
Eric Kuhn, PhD
Clinical Psychologist; Clinical Associate Professor (Affiliated), Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
VA National Center for PTSD Dissemination and Training Division; Stanford University School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Palo Alto, CA, USA
Dr. Eric Kuhn is a Clinical Psychologist at the Dissemination and Training Division of the VA National Center for PTSD (NCPTSD) and Clinical Associate Professor (Affiliated) at Stanford University School of Medicine where he co-leads the Stanford Mental Health Technology and Innovation Hub. Dr. Kuhn is a founder of and leader in NCPTSD’s Mobile Mental Health Program, which has developed a suite of mobile apps designed to address PTSD and related comorbidities and currently directs the VA's Center for Mobile Apps Research Resources and Services (CMARRS). Dr. Kuhn has federally funded programs of research focusing on using technology, both web and mobile, to increase access to and engagement in PTSD and related mental health care and to make care more patient-centered, efficient, and effective.
Sarah Lichenstein, PhD
Yale School of Medicine
New Haven, CT, USA
Dr. Lichenstein is a licensed clinical psychologist and an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Yale conducting multimodal neuroimaging research to elucidate the role of developing neural network connectivity in the pathophysiology of substance use disorders (SUD). Specifically, her work focuses on how different trajectories of brain development interact with substance exposure to influence the etiology and course of problematic substance use in adolescence and emerging adulthood. Current projects seek to identify neural mechanisms of risk for problem cannabis use and examine cannabinoid effects on the brain. By improving our understanding of the neural mechanisms of risk for SUD, Dr. Lichenstein's work ultimately aims to facilitate the development of novel prevention and intervention strategies for at-risk youth.
Advisory Editors
Jamie Horder, PhD
Jamie’s background is in cognitive neuroscience. Before becoming an editor, Jamie completed a postdoc at King’s College London on the neuroscience of autism, and prior to that a PhD at Oxford studying depression. Jamie joined the Neuroscience & Psychology team of Nature Communications in October 2017, where he handled a broad range of manuscripts, including cognitive and systems neuroscience, psychiatry, cognitive and social psychology, and network science. He joined the team at Nature Human Behaviour in January 2019 and he is primarily responsible for social and affective neuroscience, psychiatry, and complex systems, but also work from allied fields, especially cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and computational sciences.
Natalia Gass, PhD
Natalia joined Nature Mental Health in April 2022. She received her PhD degree in Neuroscience in 2010 at the University of Helsinki, Finland, where she studied molecular and genetic pathways of disturbed sleep and depression. She then moved to the Central Institute of Mental Health Mannheim, University of Heidelberg to carry out her postdoctoral work, investigating neuroimaging endophenotypes of neuropsychiatric disorders, and neural circuitry changes in response to pharmacological challenges (ketamine, antipsychotics) using MRI methods. She accomplished collaborative projects for the IMI NEWMEDS (Novel Methods leading to New Medications in Depression and Schizophrenia) international consortium and obtained funding for Principal Investigator from the German Research Foundation, publishing >25 peer-reviewed research papers. She has special interest in personalized and preventive psychiatry, neuroimaging and neuropsychopharmacology. Natalia is based in Berlin.
Editorial Board Members
Christopher Benwell, PhD, University of Dundee, UK
Raymond Bond, PhD, Ulster University, United Kingdom
Laura Fusar-Poli, PhD, University of Catania, Catania, Italy
Ruiyang Ge, PhD, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Laura Hemming, PhD, Australian National University, Australia
Patricia Kerig, PhD, University of Utah, USA
Kevin S Masters, PhD, University of Colorado Denver, Denver, CO, USA
Maurice Mulvenna, PhD, Ulster University, United Kingdom
Jim van Os, MD, PhD, Utrecht University Medical Centre, Utrecht, The Netherlands
David Lewis Penn, PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Australian Catholic University, Chapel Hill, NC and Melbourne, VIC
Rajiv Radhakrishnan, MD, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
Evanthia Sakellari, PhD, University of West Attica, Athens, Greece
Matt Somerville,PhD, University College London, London, United Kingdom
Chris Wagstaff, RMN, PhD, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
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