Our Team

Jordan Smoller, MD, ScD, is a psychiatrist, epidemiologist and geneticist whose research focus has been understanding the genetic and environmental determinants of psychiatric disorders across the lifespan and using big data to advance precision mental health including improved methods to reduce risk and enhance resilience.

Dr. Smoller earned his undergraduate degree summa cum laude at Harvard University and his medical degree at Harvard Medical School. After completing residency training in psychiatry at McLean Hospital, he received masters and doctoral degrees in epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Dr. Smoller is the Massachusetts General Hospital Trustees Endowed Chair in Psychiatric Neuroscience, professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. He is associate chief for research in the Mass General Department of Psychiatry, director of the Center for Precision Psychiatry and director of the Psychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit in the Mass General Center for Genomic Medicine. Dr. Smoller is a Tepper Family MGH Research Scholar and also serves as director of the Omics Unit of the Mass General Division of Clinical Research and co-director of the Mass General Brigham Biobank. He is director of the Mass General Brigham Training Program in Precision and Genomic Medicine, an associate member of the Broad Institute, co-chair of the Cross-Disorder Workgroup of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium and president of the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics.

He has played a leading role in national and international efforts to advance precision medicine. He is a Principal Investigator (PI) in the eMERGE (Electronic Medical Records and Genomics) network, founding PI of the PsycheMERGE Consortium and lead PI of the New England Precision Medicine Consortium as part of the NIH All of Us Research Program and co-Chair of the All of Us Science Committee. Dr. Smoller is an author of more than 400 scientific publications and is also the author of The Other Side of Normal (HarperCollins/William Morrow, 2012).

Kate Bentley, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist and assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School. Her research focuses on the prediction and prevention of suicidal and nonsuicidal self-injurious thoughts and behaviors. Dr. Bentley completed her PhD in clinical psychology at Boston University and her predoctoral internship in the Mass General cognitive-behavioral therapy track. She currently holds a five-year National Institute of Mental Health career development award that focuses on using mobile devices to improve the short-term prediction of suicide risk following psychiatric hospitalization. She also has other ongoing projects focused on developing, evaluating and implementing scalable, transdiagnostic interventions for reducing suicide risk.

Taylor A. Burke, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and member of the faculty at Harvard Medical School. She specializes in the prediction and prevention of self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (SITBs) among adolescents and young adults. Dr. Burke uses novel methodologies and computational approaches to improve the identification of individuals at risk to better intervene and prevent SITBs. Dr. Burke earned her BA in psychology at Duke University and her PhD in clinical psychology at Temple University. She subsequently completed a pre-doctoral clinical psychology internship and an NIMH-funded T32 post-doctoral fellowship in child mental health at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Dr. Burke holds a five-year NIMH career development award that focuses on using passive mobile sensing, adolescent sleep and physical activity assessment, and advanced computational approaches to idiographic modeling to develop proximal risk models for increases in suicidal ideation. She also has other ongoing research supported by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and the NIMH focused on leveraging computer vision to enhance suicide risk screening in pediatric health care settings.

Rebecca Fortgang, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and an instructor at Harvard Medical School. Her research primarily focuses on serious mental illness and suicide, with a focus on impulsivity and related processes. Dr. Fortgang completed her PhD in Clinical Psychology at Yale University and her predoctoral clinical internship in Clinical and Community Psychology at Yale School of Medicine. She completed a Harvard College Fellowship in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, as well as a postdoctoral T32 training fellowship in psychiatric epidemiology and biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health/Harvard University Department of Psychology. She is currently involved in several ongoing projects related to predicting, preventing, and understanding suicide and psychosis.

Tian Ge, PhD is an applied mathematician and biostatistician who works at the intersection of neuroimaging science, genetics and statistics. His current research focuses on developing statistical and computational methods to integrate large-scale imaging, genomic, and biomedical data. Dr. Ge received his BS in Mathematics and PhD in Applied Mathematics from Fudan University, and a PhD in Computer Science from University of Warwick. He completed his postdoctoral training with Mert Sabuncu, PhD and Jordan Smoller, MD at Mass General and Harvard Medical School. He is currently an Instructor at Harvard Medical school, a junior faculty member in the Psychiatric & Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit (PNGU), Center for Genomic Medicine, and is also affiliated with Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Chris Kennedy, PhD, is a biostatistician and instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on developing machine/deep learning, causal inference, and item response theory methods for mental health. He is also co-investigator of an NIH-funded R01 investigating e-cigarette marketing on social media using computer vision and NLP. He completed his PhD in biostatistics from the University of California, Berkeley; his postdoctoral fellowship was in the department of biomedical informatics at HMS, with a focus on computer vision and opioid prescribing in surgery.

Richard Liu, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. He is Director of Suicide Research in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Director of Big Data Studies in the Depression Clinic and Research Program at MGH. His research program focuses on characterizing dynamic processes of risk underlying onset and recurrence of self-injurious thoughts and behaviors and depression in youth and young adults. He is currently the principal investigator of three NIMH-funded studies involving computational modeling of ecological momentary assessment data and ambulatory measures of psychosocial stress, family dynamics, sleep and physiological arousal, as well as neurocognitive markers of short-term risk for suicidal behavior in adolescents. His completed his pre-doctoral internship at the University of Illinois at Chicago and his post-doctoral fellowship at Brown University. Richard earned his PhD at Temple University and his BA at Cornell University.

Yi-han Sheu received his MD degree at National Taiwan University and completed residency and fellowship training in psychiatry at National Taiwan University Hospital. He then went on to complete degrees of MPH in Healthcare Management and Policy and ScD in Epidemiology, both at Harvard University. His doctoral thesis involves using electronic health records data to improve treatment decision in psychiatric disorders by combining machine learning, artificial intelligence and epidemiological approaches. He is currently interested in increasing medical care precision by further extending the application of the methodologies above, and to achieve so, improving its prerequisites in general artificial intelligence, such as model interpretation and robustness, incorporation of causal inferential methods, effective transfer learning and building multi-modal knowledge representations.

Dr. Younga (“Heather”) Lee, an Instructor in Psychology in the Psychiatric & Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit at MGH Center for Genomic Medicine, earned her PhD in Epidemiology from Brown University and refined her focus on psychiatric genetics during her postdoctoral training with Dr. Jordan Smoller. Her research is primarily focused on two main objectives: 1) exploring individual-level and contextual factors that jointly shape mental health risk, and 2) examining the dynamics and barriers surrounding participation in large-scale biobank studies, with a focus on the issues faced by historically minoritized populations. Dr. Lee integrates methods of causal inference, machine learning, and statistical genetics to examine multimodal data collected from large-scale biobanks studies (specifically, the Mass General Brigham Biobank and the NIH’s All of Us Research Program), including surveys, electronic health records, genomics, and geocoded data.

Travis Mallard, PhD is a clinical psychologist whose research is focused on understanding the etiology of psychiatric disorders, with a particular interest in forms of psychopathology that are characterized by disinhibition and/or psychosis. He is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Precision Psychiatry, the Psychiatric & Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit, and the Center for Genomic Medicine, where he is working with Dr. Jordan Smoller to advance understanding of comorbidity and bridge levels of analysis in psychiatric genetics. Travis completed his doctoral training in clinical psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and he received additional training in statistical genetics and imaging genetics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the National Institute of Mental Health, respectively.

Bo Wang, PhD, is a postdoctoral research fellow, working with Dr. Jordan Smoller at the Center. He received his PhD in natural language processing from University of Warwick, followed by postdoctoral training in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford and the Alan Turing Institute. He is interested in learning patient representation and modelling patient health trajectory from multi-modal data including clinical notes from EHRs. His current research focuses on suicide risk prediction and developing methods to improve the selection of treatments for depression.

Lauren Haliczer, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital, working with mentors Drs. Richard Liu and Taylor Burke. Her research primarily focuses on the prediction, prevention, and treatment of self-injurious behaviors and related conditions (e.g., borderline personality disorder). Dr. Haliczer received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and completed her Predoctoral Clinical Internship at Brown University. Lauren's current fellowship is supported by an NIMH F32 award, focused on the roles of social stress and self-criticism/self-conscious emotions in the short-term prediction of suicidal thoughts and behaviors among adolescents, both in the lab and in daily life.

Justin Tubbs, PhD is a postdoctoral fellow whose work focuses on leveraging findings and methods from psychiatric genetics to improve clinically-relevant outcomes such as treatment response and disease course, with a particular interest in mood and anxiety disorders. Additional research interests include methods development for statistical genetics and understanding etiological mechanisms conferring risk for psychiatric disorders.

Dia Kabir is a Clinical Research Coordinator at the Smoller Lab. She earned both her BA in Biology with a concentration in Cell Biology, Molecular Biology, and Genetics, and her MS in Clinical Research from Boston University. She has previous engagement in clinical research through the School of Public Health at Boston University, and within Boston Medical Center’s Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Clinic. Her research interests lie in the realm of exploring how genetics influence mood and well-being and how to create health policies and interventions that can ultimately maximize positive mental health outcomes. She hopes to pursue a PhD in Clinical Psychology in the future, with the intentions of pursuing a career within mental health research.

Emily Madsen graduated from SUNY Stony Brook University with a BS in biology specializing in developmental genetics. She previously worked closely with the clinical interpretation team of a clinical genetics laboratory focused on rare pediatric disorders. She is excited to learn more about complex trait genetics and psychiatric disorders.

Marina Wilson is a Clinical Research Coordinator in the Center and the Smoller Lab. She has earned her BS in Psychology from Northeastern University. She has previously worked in an outpatient clinic for youth and adolescent supporting different programs and research projects. She is excited to learn more about the innovative tools used to examine various psychiatric disorders.

Matthew graduated from Cornell University with a BA in Psychology, concentrating in Behavioral and Evolutionary Neuroscience, and Religious Studies. He is passionate about diagnostic precision in the identification and treatment of mood disorders, especially in individuals with treatment resistant depression, and is excited to explore these interests further as a member of the CPP team.

Sophia Kim is a Clinical Research Coordinator for the CPP who graduated from Boston University with a B.A. in English and Psychology. She previously worked with an anxiety center, supporting populations with substance use and related mood disorders. She also worked to found an organization supporting survivors of sexual violence in college campuses nationwide. Sophia hopes to eventually pursue a PhD in Clinical Psychology, and is particularly interested in supporting underrepresented communities, including sexual and racial minorities.

Fanta Kuhlman is the Senior Grant Administrator for the Center. She oversees grants applications, budget management, and funding compliance. With more than two decades of experience in handling multi-million-dollar contracts, she is a solution driven Sr. Grants Administrator. She stays updated on emerging trends and best practices in the constantly evolving field of grants management. She enjoys collaborating with investigators to secure crucial funding, advance their research and create a positive impact on the community they serve.

Victoria Dobrzycki, BS, is the Marketing and Administrative Coordinator for the Center of Precision Psychiatry. She holds a BS in Health Management and Policy and minor in Psychology from the University of New Hampshire. Victoria is currently pursuing her Masters of Business Administration at Suffolk University's Sawyer Business School. Victoria has a passion for administration in the healthcare industry, especially in the areas of psychiatry, psychology, behavioral health, and research.

Kristin Joyce is the assistant to Dr. Smoller. She has been employed with Mass General for over 25 years and has held this position since July 2013. Kristin is mission-driven, embraces diversity and has the proven ability to adapt to any given situation. She thrives when utilizing her interpersonal skills, prioritizing knowledge and multitasking abilities makes her an integral part of the team.

Ashley Seiger-Jones, MSc, is the Program Director for the Center. Previously, she served as the Senior Clinical Research and Administrative Program Manager for the Center and PNGU. Ashley has over a decade of clinical research experience and holds a Masters degree in Management, focused specifically on research administration. Ashley thrives on team inclusion and is passionate about streamlining processes to enhance study and team efficiencies across all phases of the research process.

Sarah Knoll graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology. Prior to her work at the Center for Precision Psychiatry, she worked at Massachusetts General Hospital's Center for Addiction Medicine under Dr. Randi Schuster. At the Center for Addiction Medicine, Sarah's research focused on (1) the impact of cannabis abstinence on suicidal ideation, suicidal behavior, depression, and sleep, and (2) a research initiative funded by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health that collects data on youth mental health and substance use through annual middle and high-school surveys. Her research interests include accessibility, scalability, and effectiveness of mental health interventions and treatments for depression and suicide in underserved populations.