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Ana Aquino received her bachelor’s degree in Biology from UCLA in 2000. She is the Project Coordinator for the Risk and Predictors of Postpartum Depression study.

Ana joined the UCLA Mood Disorders Research Program in 1999 and is currently our senior research coordinator. She is fluent in Spanish and is originally from Central America.

Her interest in research includes mood disorders and pregnancy.

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Lara Foland attended the University of California at Santa Cruz in 2001 where she received her bachelor’s degree in Psychobiology. She acquired EEG training in a private Neurofeedback clinic following graduation and later structural and functional MRI training at Stanford University.

Currently she is a graduate student in the UCLA Interdepartmental Ph.D. Program for Neuroscience and is under the direct mentoring support of Paul Thompson, Ph.D. at the Laboratory of NeuroImaging (LONI) and Lori Altshuler, M.D. at the Mood Disorders Research Program (MDRP).

Lara’s research aims at detecting the abnormalities in fronto-limbic emotion regulatory networks in bipolared patients, and whether these functional differences are correlated with differences in brain structure.

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Gerhard Hellemann, Ph.D., biostatistician for the Mood Disorders Research Program, received a Dipl.Stat. From the University of Dortmund and a Ph.D. in Psychometrics and Measurement from UCLA in 2005.

Dr. Hellemann’s main research interest is the analysis of longitudinal data using latent growth curve modeling, and applications of generalized linear models to hierarchical and longitudinal data.

At the UCLA Mood Disorders Research Program, Dr. Hellemann is responsible for the analysis of the data associated with the Stanley Database Core.

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Moraya Moini completed her bachelor’s degree in1998 at the University of California Santa Cruz in Molecular, Cellular, Developmental Biology and a Masters of Public Health in 2000 at the University of Southern California in Health Promotion and Disease Prevention.

Moraya serves as a Program Manager for the Predictors of Postpartum Depression project for the Mood Disorders Research Program. Among other programmatic management duties, she advises on and conducts recruitment of pregnant women into a NIMH funded national collaborative research study with Harvard and Emory Universities which is investigating the risk and predictors of postpartum depression.

With over 10 years experience in the field, she focuses on academic-community-partnered research, assets-based program planning/implementation/evaluation, organizational development, and social marketing within varying cultural backgrounds.

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