About Me

I am a scientist interested in translational approaches bridging computational models and human imaging of healthy controls and patients. In academia and industry settings, my research focuses on the following axes:

1) Mechanisms underlying transcranial stimulation in psychiatry
2) Developing novel tools to advance multimodal imaging
3) Leveraging multimodal neuro-behavioral approaches to investigate psychiatric disorders
4) Interventional pharmacological approaches in psychiatric disorders

Currently, I hold the position of Associate Research Scientist at the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine where I work in the Anticevic Lab affiliated with the Division of Neurocognition, Neurocomputation & Neurogenetics (N3). In addition to my research, I took on the role of the Administrative and Scientific director of a multicenter brain-based clinical trial developed to test whether a dopamine 1 partial agonist novel compound affects working memory neural circuits in patients with early episode schizophrenia (NCT04457310).

I am also deeply interested in open access science and contributing to research reproducibility.

In my spare time, you will find me outdoors with my wonderful husband and energetic twin daughters, usually traveling to new places, hiking or climbing with our dog Pixel, while Jupiter, our cat, protects the house.

Detailed Contribution to Science

1.Attentional Preparation and Distractibility. My early career contributions were focused on attentional preparation and distractibility in the auditory cortex. This project is a collaboration between two labs [Lyon Neuroscience Research Center and Helen Wills Neurosciences Institute] and includes multiple research axis involving different imaging techniques [scalp EEG, intracranial EEG and MEG] as well as both healthy controls and patients with prefrontal cortex lesions. My role in this project was first to help validate the distractibility task that would be used throughout this project as well as study the resulting interaction between top-down and bottom-up mechanisms of auditory attention in healthy control scalp EEG data, which resulted in my first publication as an undergraduate. I was also involved in building the methodological. environment and analyzing the preliminary data from patients with lesions in the prefrontal cortex with scalp EEG data and sEEG data. Due to the length of recruitment and interest of adding different age groups, this part of the study is still ongoing.

2. Mechanisms underlying transcranial stimulation in psychiatry. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a technique emerging as a prospective therapy for neurologic, psychiatric and addictive disorders. It is used to modulate neuronal activity in the brain. Two frontal tDCS montages have shown promise in modulating cognitive abilities and/or helping to alleviate clinical symptoms. However, the effects of tDCS on brain physiology are still poorly understood. This work was clarified the brain mechanisms underlying frontal tDCS in healthy subjects, specifically in relation to the dopaminergic system. Using a double-blind sham-controlled design, we combined a single session of tDCS online with several imaging techniques (PET or simultaneous PET-MRI) with the subject at rest. A first study (n=32, 2mA, 20min) showed that bifrontal tDCS induced an increase in extracellular dopamine in the ventral striatum, involved in the reward- motivation network, after the stimulation period. The 2nd study (n=30, 1mA, 30min) leverages the novel combined PET-MRI machine in order to analyze the effects of the stimulation simultaneously across different imaging modalities (e.g PET and functional MRI). The manuscript for this study is in preparation and will be submitted for peer review in the coming months. Overall, the present work provides direct first evidence that a single session of frontal tDCS impacts the dopaminergic system in regions connected to the stimulated cortical areas. This work has already been replicated by other groups and solicited interest in the media and at conferences (Young Investigator award and 2 poster prizes). Therefore, levels of dopamine activity and reactivity should be new elements to consider for a general hypothesis of brain modulation by frontal tDCS. In addition, in order to help with improve the reproducibility of this field of research, I have been actively involved with multiple collaborators regarding potential confounding effects, such as the parameters of sham stimulation used and the impact of the electric field distribution.

3. Developing novel tools to advance multimodal imaging. In addition to my work with transcranial stimulation, I have worked in collaboration with several groups to advance hardware and software tools for multimodal neuroimaging analysis. This ongoing aim is to help the scientific community to bridge clinical and neuroimaging approaches. Currently, I am focusing on implementing novel analytics pipeline aimed to optimize multimodal PET-MR integration (Fonteneau et al, in progress).

4. Leveraging multimodal neuro-behavioral approaches to investigate psychiatric disorders. Using the clinical and technically tools developed, I became interested in leveraging multimodal imaging approaches in order to dissect networks disturbances in psychiatric disorders in relation to subject-level behavioral variation. The first axis focuses on characterizing the thalamocortical network development across the mental health spectra (Lee* and Fonteneau* et al, in progress). Indeed, patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder consistently showing a combination of thalamic hypo-connectivity with the prefrontal cortex and thalamic hyper-connectivity with the sensorimotor cortex. However, critical knowledge gaps remain with respect to the normal developmental trajectory of thalamocortical networks and onset of thalamocortical disturbances in psychosis as well as how individual differences in thalamocortical connectivity relate to cognitive impairment in individuals expressing psychosis spectrum symptoms. The second axis focuses on establishing a brain-behavioral space across mood spectrum disorders leveraging an initial data-driven reduction of the symptom space, which we in turn map onto data-driven neural maps across patients (Berkovitch et al, submitted). Indeed, mood spectrum disorders are associated with a broad range of symptoms, such as anxious arousal, anhedonic depression and distress. Parsing this heterogeneity is a key challenge to determine effective personalized treatments across the mood spectrum disorders. The third axis focuses on leveraging multimodal PET-MR imaging in order to investigate the impact of ketamine in major depressive disorder (Fonteneau et al, in progress).

5. Interventional pharmacological approaches in psychiatric disorders. Finally, I apply pharmacological imaging involving glutamatergic and dopaminergic systems to validate proposed mechanisms of action underlying psychiatric disorders (Moujaes F, submitted; Rahmati M, under review by co-authors). Notably, I hold the role of the Administrative and Scientific director of a multicenter brain-based clinical trial developed to test whether a dopamine 1 partial agonist novel compound affects working memory neural circuits in patients with early episode schizophrenia (Fonteneau et al, in progress).

Link to a full list of my published work can be found here.

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