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.
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.
Elizabeth H. Connors, PhD
Associate 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.
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; Associate Professor, 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 Associate Professor 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.
Feifan Liu, PhD
UMass Chan Medical School
Worcester, MA, USA
Dr. Liu is an Associate Professor of the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School and the founding director of the innovative AI for Health (iAI4Health) lab. He is trained in computer science with expertise in natural language processing, machine (deep) learning, and AI-based risk predictive modeling. Dr. Liu has extensive experience in exploiting advanced AI techniques to analyze heterogeneous clinical data to enhance clinical decision-making across a spectrum of critical domains (e.g., suicide risk prediction, HIV prevention). In addition, his work involves AI fairness assessment and bias mitigation among marginalized and underserved populations in the context of AI for health equity.
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.
Nicole Montijn, PhD
Nicole joined Nature Communications in January 2023. After completing a MSc in Neuroscience at Utrecht University, Nicole worked as a data scientist at the Erasmus MC in Rotterdam before returning to Utrecht to do their PhD in Clinical Psychology. Their PhD research focused on (non)adaptive changes in episodic memory and future thinking related to stress and anxiety. Nicole handles submissions related to cognitive, social and clinical psychology as well as neuroscience, and is based in the Berlin office.
Editorial Board Members
Christopher Benwell, PhD, University of Dundee, United Kingdom
Raymond Bond, PhD, Ulster University, United Kingdom
Laura Fusar-Poli, PhD, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy
Ruiyang Ge, PhD, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Laura Hemming, PhD, La Trobe University, Australia
Patricia Kerig, PhD, University of Utah, USA
Kevin S Masters, PhD, University of Colorado 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, NC and Melbourne, VIC
Rajiv Radhakrishnan, MD, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
Evanthia Sakellari, PhD, University of West Attica, Athens, Greece
Maria Schweer-Collins, PhD, Department of Psychology, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA
Matt Somerville, PhD, University College London, London, United Kingdom
Chris Wagstaff, RMN, PhD, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
Yuan-Wei Yao, PhD, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
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