Carmen Andreescu, MD
Principal Investigator

Dr. Andreescu is a geriatric psychiatrist and over the last decade she studied the neural basis of mood and anxiety disorders in the elderly. She is currently investigating the functional neuroanatomy correlates of worry in older adults, with a special interest for the association of worry severity with connectivity measures in canonical brain networks and the moderation effect of brain aging. Additionally, Dr. Andreescu studies functional connectivity changes associated with medication exposure in late-life depression. She is also involved in projects focused on the association between insulin resistance and depression.

Howard Aizenstein, MD, PhD
Co-Investigator

Dr. Aizenstein is an expert on the cognitive and affective neuroscience of aging and geriatric brain disorders. He is trained as a geriatric psychiatrist and also a computer scientist. His research program is recognized for expertise in MRI analyses methods, as well as their use for clinical research in aging. Dr. Aizenstein’s research group has developed semi-automated methods of morphometric and functional MRI analyses. He uses structural and functional neuroimaging to identify networks of brain regions associated with affective and cognitive processing, and how these change over time with and without intervention. Dr. Aizenstein has experience with fMRI studies in a variety of psychiatric disorders involving mood and cognitive disorders. He will contribute to science his expertise in brain imaging, the analysis of brain images, and geriatric psychiatry.

Helmet Karim, PhD
Postdoctoral Associate/Junior Faculty

I develop models to predict treatment response variability in major depression primarily using neuroimaging data. I also help develop pipelines for neuroimage processing.

Deb Goodnow
Study Coordinator

Mary Young
Clinical Research Coordinator

Warren D. Taylor, MD, MHSc
Principal Investigator

Carrie Williams
Study Coordinator

Kathrine Anders
Clinic Research Coordinator

Olusola Ajilore, MD, PhD
Principal Investigator

Dr. Ajilore is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a degree in biology. Dr. Ajilore went on to do his MD/PhD degree at Stanford University where he studied the deleterious effects of stress hormones on the brain. He joined the research track residency at UCLA where he transitioned into neuroimaging in major depression. His lab currently uses computational neuroimaging techniques and digital biomarkers to better track and treat neuropsychiatric disorders.

Alex Leow, MD, PhD
Co-Principal Investigator

Dr. Alex Leow is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry, Bioengineering, and Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and an attending physician at the University of Illinois Hospital. With Dr. Olu Ajilore, Alex founded the Collaborative Neuroimaging Environment for Connectomics (CoNECt) at UIC. CoNECt is an inter-departmental research team devoted to the study of the human brain using multidisciplinary approaches of brain imaging, non-invasive brain stimulation, Big Data analytics, virtual-reality immersive visualization, and more recently mobile technologies.

Alex is honored to the project lead of the BiAffect project. BiAffect is the first scientific study that seeks to turn smartphones into “brain fitness trackers”, by unobtrusively inferring neuropsychological functioning using entirely passively-collected typing kinematics metadata (i.e., not what you type but how you type it) from a smartphone’s virtual keyboard. The iOS BiAffect study app now powers the first-ever crowd-sourced research study to unobtrusively measure mood and cognition in real-time using iPhones and Apple’s ResearchKit framework. 

The CoNECt team’s research has been extensively featured in the news, including more recently in Chicago Tribune, Chicago Tonight, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, and TEDxChicago.

Amruta Barve
Study Staff

Camryn Gill
Study Staff

Ellyn Kennelly
Study Staff