Team

Reza Tadayon-Nejad, MD, PhD is an Assistant Clinical Professor of psychiatry at UCLA and Visiting Associate faculty in Neuroscience at California Institute of Technology.

He obtained his medical degree from Ahwaz University of Medical Sciences and did a PhD in Neuroscience at Hotchkiss Brain Institute, University of Calgary. He then completed a residency in psychiatry followed by a NIMH-funded T32 fellowship in Neuroscience of Mental Health with focus on psychiatric neuroimaging at the University of Illinois at Chicago before joining UCLA in 2016. He was awarded a mentored NIMH K23 and Brain & Behavior Research Foundation Young Investigator Grant (NARSAD) to study underlying decision-making mechanisms of compulsivity in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

He is a board-certified psychiatrist and involved in the treatment of patients with refractory OCD, depression, and related comorbidities. He is the director of the UCLA OCD Intensive Treatment Program as well as the principal investigator of the UCLA OCD deep brain stimulation (DBS) treatment program. He is also a staff psychiatrist at UCLA TMS clinical and research service.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reza-tadayon-nejad-md-phd-260699a5/
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=YZSP_PcAAAAJ

Stephanie Chu is a 2nd year neuroscience PhD student mentored by Drs. Reza Tadayon-Nejad and Andrew Leuchter. She is interested in using brain stimulation, functional neuroimaging, as well as electrophysiology to study brain dynamics within psychiatric disorders. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG), she examines the effects of brain stimulation on network dynamics, clinical outcomes, and decision-making measures within OCD and depression patients. In collaboration with the O’Doherty lab at Caltech, she also explores the intrinsic brain networks involved in decision-making by analyzing resting state fMRI data within healthy participants and psychiatric patients. Previously, Stephanie has worked as a research assistant in the Dementia Imaging Genetics lab at UCSF under the mentorship of Dr. Suzee Lee.

Emmily Hovhannisyan graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a B.A. in psychology. As a research associate for Dr. Tadayon-Nejad, Emmily manages multiple studies. She primarily works on our projects examining the impact of neuromodulation on decision-making in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Additionally, she investigates the use of neuromodulation as a treatment for depression. Email: EHovhannisyan@mednet.ucla.edu

Dov Lerman-Sinkoff MD PhD (he/him) is a PGY3 resident in the UCLA Psychiatry Research Track interested in improving the understanding of brain-behavior relationships implicated in cognitive alterations in psychiatric illnesses and the use of neuromodulation to improve functional outcomes. He obtained his BSE in Biomedical Engineering with a focus in Electrical Engineering at the University of Michigan. He obtained his MD and PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis under the mentorship of Dr. Deanna Barch. During his PhD, he used multimodal neuroimaging methods to simultaneously decompose structural, resting state functional connectivity, and task functional MRI data and examined relationships between the identified imaging patterns and cognitive control performance in a healthy community participant sample from the Human Connectome Project and in a transdiagnostic sample of persons with psychosis. Here at UCLA, he is working with Dr. Reza Tadayon-Nejad to study decision making in obsessive-compulsive disorder and the use of non-invasive neuromodulation to alter neural activity with the goal of lessening symptom burden and improving performance.